Joe, I don’t see how it does amount to tracking… Tracking means keeping a log of the location of a particular person over time. This is not how Apple’s crowd-sourcing of location data works. As Apple has repeatedly said, the location data sent back to them for the purposes of maintaining their location database is anonymous – this means the data cannot be associated with a particular iPhone. Google, Skyhook and others have similar databases, and they are pretty fundamental to how mobile devices determine their location.

You also need to realise that the location service in iOS also downloads location data from Apple, so that the phone can locate itself via cell towers or Wi-Fi hotspots. This downloaded cache of location data is what was discovered in the consolidated.db file that everyone got so excited about. As Apple has also explained, the phone preemptively downloads data for cell towers and Wi-Fi hotspots in a wide radius around your current location, so that the phone doesn’t need to requery Apple when you move from your current position. This is what a cache is for – it is to allow the location of the device to be determined quickly and without having to perform an expensive (in terms of internet data usage and phone battery life) query back to Apple every time.

You might also ask why are there timestamps in the data stored on the phone. Well this is also essential to how a cache works – if iOS wants to delete locations after 7 days (as iOS 4.3.3 now does) it needs to know when the data was originally download from Apple. There’s no other way to do it!