Your iPhone and iPad use Location Services to track places you go that it deems important to you. That’s to help Maps, Photos, and other apps to offer up better location-based information. That’s either really cool, or super creepy, depending on your point of view. Here’s how to see the significant locations where your iPhone and iPad have tracked you.
To see the Significant Locations your iPhone or iPad logged, do this:
- Launch Settings
- Tap Privacy
- Choose Location Services
- Tap System Services
- Select Significant Locations
You’ll need to authenticate with Touch ID, Face ID, or your device passcode to see the list of locations. That’s good because you don’t want just anyone seeing where you hang out.
My list was pretty interesting. In some cases, the locations made sense—like the coffee shop I frequent near my house. Others, like a perfume shop, were totally off base. The perfume shop is near a business I do visit, but I didn’t even know the tagged business existed until I checked my Significant Locations list.
The list is encrypted and Apple says it can’t read them. If you’d rather not have that list at all, here’s how to get rid of it and keep it from populating again:
- Launch Settings
- Tap Privacy
- Choose Location Services
- Tap System Services
- Select Significant Locations
- Scroll down and tap Clear History
- Scroll up and turn off Significant Locations
Your iPhone or iPad won’t be able to anticipate your schedule as well, and you may find other situations where you don’t get as useful location information as you previously did. That said, you probably won’t see a huge change in how apps deal with the places you routinely visit with Significant Locations turned off.
When I try to get my locations list I get to the last step and after authenticating with Touch ID my phone reverts to the home screen. Tapping Settings from there brings up the locations list but it vanishes instantly. iPhone 8, all updates applied. A shut down and restart did not help. (Apologies if this is a repeat post – my first attempt returned a “Can’t find the server” message and lost my comment verbiage.)
I thought this site was above click-baity titles. Apple isn’t tracking anybody. You even say so in the article. Not only is the title click-bait, but it throws a good helping of FUD at what can actually be helpful features for some people.
This particular feature seems a little flawed. I checked my list and found places that were significant but that my history said that I had never visited (though I had) and others that I had visited 70 times since March (so much pizza: my god, I’m training for Sumo grand championship). I tried editing locations but that seemed to freeze the phone to that entry. Also I was unable to clear the history. I performed a forced restart and still could not edit my entries but could at least back out of the edit menu. I was able to clear the history and shall see how this feature performs from now on.