Yesterday I FOUND for the first time of the existence of a file in iOS 4 that logs absolutely all the locations through which we travel with our iPhone terminal. Unfortunately, the big problem is that this file is copied to our computer when we synchronize it with iTunes and it could be taken from the computer by anyone at any time without our consent. Well, it seems that this logging is actually an iOS bug, at least that's what it claims John Gruber which states that Apple will block this bug in a future version of iOS.
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. Ie 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.
The Apple company has already started to be questioned about this bug, more precisely an American senator sent a letter to Steve Jobs asking him what are the reasons why iOS logs the locations through which we travel. Apple has a monstrous scandal ahead and there are very high chances that iOS 4.3.3 will come out soon and solve this more than important problem for Americans who care a lot about privacy. If Apple decides to release iOS 4.3.3, then we will probably be left without the untethered jailbreak solution, but at least we can rest assured that no one is counting our activity. If you have a jailbreak, you can protect yourself by installing the untrackerd tweak from Cydia.
