Thanks, Niko, for this information. Another worry when there shouldn’t be one, at all.
I’ve wondered, in addition to this invasion into our world of privacy, is whether or not the applications that you do give permission to, really follow the rules. What I mean is, if you tell the OS that you want location services turned off, does that really happen, or is it really like a toggle switch that does nothing?
Can the programmers really just say screw it and still get and report location data back even though we think we’ve disabled that part?
There really is no careful analysis of code to make sure it doesn’t do all sorts of things that we don’t want it to. And there are some applications I stopped installing when they ask for permission (at least they asked) to access my photos and contact lists. All for things that are completely unrelated to what they were supposed to do. A photo program, sure. A map program, definitely not.