The news jumped a few hours ago and ran like wildfire through social networks and blog, with more or less truthful information, but complying with the general rule that "the truth does not spoil a good headline." "Apple continues to collect your location even if you do not authorize it" is what we have been able to read in most blogs, but the reality is that this is false. So what happens? We explain it below.
The news came after a security researcher claimed that after numerous tests he had realized that the iPhone 11 Pro continues to use your location even though you had disabled this function. When reading something like this, one thinks that there must be some security flaw that causes that operation, but Apple itself has confirmed that this is not a bug that needs to be resolved, it is simply the normal behavior of the device. This statement has caused everyone's surprise, but if we continue with the explanation that the company offers us, we can understand it.
And it is that the headlines and explanations that most blogs offer are false, or at least, do not adjust well to reality. What the researcher in question did was not deactivate Location within "Settings> Privacy> Location", which has a well-defined switch. What it really did was deactivate all the services and apps, including the system services, one by one, leaving all the items deactivated, but the general switch activated. Here's the detail: the main switch was on. The researcher assumed that 100% of iPhone functions that use location at some point are included in that long list of apps and services, but this is not the case. As Apple tells us, there are certain functions that the user cannot disable individually, and that you must use the main switch to deactivate them.
That is, the user can deactivate the Location of his device and will stop collecting information, but for this he must deactivate the general switch, which is also what makes the most sense: if I want to leave the whole house light, I remove the general switch, not each and every switch in every zone in my house. There is only one exception to this, which Apple also makes very clear in its conditions: for security reasons, it can collect your location when you make an emergency call. in order to facilitate relief, even if location services are disabled.