iPhone’s Hidden Function That Records Where You’ve Been And How Long You’ve Been There – Want To See It?

As August comes to an end and with it summer for some, I thought I’d just write a quick post to let you in on one of the iPhone’s little hidden secrets that many of you, I’m sure, may not be entirely aware of: Apple’s phone has a hidden function that records where you’ve been and how long you spent there. That may strike fear into the hearts of many knowing that Apple along with the more nefarious Google is tracking everything we do but, thankfully for now anyway, not what we’re thinking!

Note:  The following only applies if you have Location Services Turned On

Go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services > System Services

It is kind of Orwellian to realize that your iPhone can keep a perfect record of where you’ve been in the last month or so along with the exact time you arrived at and when you left. Just think of the possibilities if someone who you didn’t want to know where you were at ever got a hold of your iPhone and knew how to check this. Well, I’m going to show all of you amateur detectives exactly how to do this!  To begin, just follow the steps in the image above.

On the System Services screen scroll down and click on Frequent Locations

The System Services menu shows all kinds of different option but the one we want is Frequent Locations. This is the nasty little option that tracks where you’ve been and for how long. Clicking on this might just shock you but it’s worth a look anyway!

Frequent Locations is displayed in both text and map form

Looking at the image above, the first screen that displays after clicking on Frequent Locations is the History section on the left that shows how many times you’ve visited this location in the last month or so and the date range. Selecting one of the items will show a map like the one on the right.

A Map display showing where you’ve been, on what date and for how long

As you can see by the image above Frequent Locations knows to the minute how long you’ve been at a specific location. It’s quite frightening in a way especially if you had no idea the iPhone was doing this.

Now the good news – you can prohibit this type of tracking by turning off Location Services on the Settings menu. This, however, will disable many of the features required by valuable apps like GPS, Maps and others. Another way, if you don’t want to turn Location Services off, is to simply turn off Frequent Locations.This option is for those folks who visited somewhere they shouldn’t have and want to keep it a secret – ha, ha!!  Google will probably get you then.

Thanks for visiting!