"By using any location-based services on your iPhone, you agree and consent to Apple's and its partners' and licensees' transmission, collection, maintenance, processing and use of your location data and queries to provide and improve such products and services. You may withdraw this consent at any time by going to the Location Services setting on your iPhone and either turning off the global Location Services setting or turning off the individual location settings of each location-aware application on your iPhone."
That's conflicting with your answer that it can't be turned off.
I'm going to test this in a minute -- but hypothetically -- let's say I follow the instructions in the TOS and turn off location services -- and this file STILL gets created and tracks my location...isn't that a violation of their terms?
I just turned off location services in the system settings. Tomorrow when I go to work I'm going to run the program and see if it's still tracking my location. I'll update this thread when I get the answer, but I have a pretty good idea it's still going to be tracking my location.
The implications here are profound -- I gladly submit to a gps application (let's say Navigon) to access my location at the time I click the "OK" button on the popup that asks my permission -- what I am not granting permission to is the device to track my location and store it in a database file 24\7...Why does Navigon or whatever app need to know where I was last week, or last month? Or the cell towers and mac addresses of the Wifi access points I have come in contact with? What if someone were to steal my phone and extract this file? You can encrypt the sync backup file (which would prevent someone from accessing the information that is stored on your itunes computer) -- but you can not encrypt it on the device itself...
Call me paranoid, but anyone using an iDevice should be concerned about this...I don't think this is right at all.
Keep in mind that ALL iDevices except for the iPad 2 have the ability to be "jailbroken" -- meaning anyone who grabs your phone \ ipad (or ipod touch maybe? I bet the non-3g devices just track the MAC addresses of all the wifi access points you come in range of) has the ability to run an exploit and completely unlock the filesystem on the device and be granted root access.