John Gruber of the Daring Fireball website has been researching the iPhone consolidated.db tracking issues of late, and has been talking to a “little birdie”, a friend inside of Apple. Who has explained the tracking information stored within the consolidated.db file is actually a bug, rather than a design of the iOS mobile operating system.
Gruber explains that the consolidated.db is supposed to only store the data on a temporary basis and is not designed to hold all a users historical location data.
John Gruber explains :
I don’t have a definitive answer, but my little-birdie-informed understanding is that consolidated.db acts as a cache for location data, and that historical data should be getting culled but isn’t, either due to a bug or, more likely, an oversight. I.e. someone wrote the code to cache location data but never wrote code to cull non-recent entries from the cache, so that a database that’s meant to serve as a cache of your recent location data is instead a persistent log of your location history.
If indeed the caching of location data is indeed a bug, you can expect Apple to roll out an update shortly. If you have a jailbroken iPhone however you can download a small app called Untrackerd, that will purge the consolidated.db data file for you.
Filed Under: Apple