So you think the people who were reporting on these issues and caused Apple to fix them did it to hate on Apple? Tthe issues were real and not made up because Apple is now fixing them. Would they have fixed it if every reporter acted like Gruber? Why do some people take it as a personal insult if people point out that Apple can ship buggy software?
Of course we couldn’t have Apple news without Gruber bashing.
"The big question, of course, is why Apple is storing this information. I don’t have a definitive answer, but the best at least somewhat-informed theory I’ve heard 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. I’d wager this gets fixed in the next iOS update.”
"The key question for Apple: Given that this file was widely known among iOS forensics experts back in September, why does it still contain historical (as opposed to just recent) location history today?”
"Android phones store the same type of location information, but, unlike iOS, Android’s cache only contains recent entries — which is to say Android is doing it right.”
I think people jumped to the conclusion that Apple was logging your actual location, which would be a big deal, and published it as fact. It's a great story and gets traffic.
That said, I cannot imagine that if they'd contacted Apple about the issue they would have gotten a useful answer without the publicity.
Bottom line though is that any sufficiently sensational story gets traffic regardless of its truth or lack of attempt to even verify the veracity of the alleged problem.
There were plenty of sensational stories, sure. There were also many reasonable stories that debated what was being tracked, many of which were discussed on HN. You can't invalidate a story because some people become sensationalist, that always happens on any controversial story.
I am sure that lots of people discussed the story; but the original story that kicked it all pitched it as an "Apple is tracking you and the guys in black suits are using it to convict you of crimes" story.
The people who were reporting these issues made false claims and presented them in the most alarmist and damaging way possible to Apple. They did this without data to support them and continued to make insinuations not supported by the facts even when other researchers showed their claims to be unsupported.
It's certainly reasonable to question their motives.
