No, and it probably will never be. As it’s turned off unless you turn it on I don’t see the point in leaving you phone vulnerable to hacking by not updating to the latest version that patches several vulnerabilities. So it’s your decision of leaving yourself at risk, or updating to a version with a feature that does nothing unless you enable it.
But if you are so interested in protecting your privacy from a non-existent threat, why do you use a cell phone at all? Do you drive a car? With the privacy risks that carries?
- Your carrier knows the location of your phone all the time, even if you turn off location services, because it can triangulate from the towers that receive your phone’s periodic “I’m here” ping. They are required by law to do this to support E911. They upload this information to databases where your location and whereabouts are known to law enforcement and any business that cares to know where you are.
- License plate scanners are ubiquitous, in police vehicles and repo trucks. And also along limited access highways, toll roads, bridges and tunnels. And every time your plate is scanned it goes into a location database.
- Electronic toll tags are obviously used every time you use a toll facility, but transponders are located everywhere along highways for traffic control. Have you see signs that display how long it will take to get to an upcoming milepost? Where do you think they get that information?
- Do you use public Wi-Fi, your cable provider’s hotspots or the “free” convenient Wi-Fi networks in malls and stores? Did you think that your location wasn’t tracked by those?
- See those cameras in stores, malls and other public places? Have you heard about facial recognition?
- Did you ever post your picture in Shutterfly? The US government as well as private data firms have the entire Shutterfly database.
- Do you have a Transit Pass account?
- Do you use an urban bicycle rental like New York’s CitiBike? Have you noticed that your usage history shows the location and time you picked up the bike and likewise when you dropped it off?
- Do you use credit cards in stores? Did you know that the location where you use a card is recorded in a worldwide central database, ostensibly to detect card fraud through what’s called a “velocity check” (AKA as the “superman test”)?
- Have you heard of iBeacon? It’s a feature that tracks and reports the location of any device that has Bluetooth enabled on a device.
- What about Find My, which always knows where your phone is? And its feature added in iOS 12 that uses the Bluetooth signals from other phones to anonymously crowdsource the location of a missing phone?
Apple is about the only business in the world that does NOT track you.
