iPhone ‘tracks location even if services are turned off’

Disabling location services won’t stop your iPhone from tracking The Journal tested the collection of data on an iPhone 4 that had been restored to factory settings and was running the latest version of Apple''s iOS operating system.

Analysts disabled location services (which are on by default) and immediately recorded the data that had initially been gathered by the phone.

The Journal then carried the phone to new locations and observed the data.

Over the span of several hours as the phone was moved, it continued to collect location data from new places.

These data included coordinates and time stamps. However, the coordinates were not from the exact locations that the phone travelled and some of them were several miles away. The phone also didn’t indicate how much time was spent in a given location.