Why you should change this iPhone setting as soon as you can.
Updated November 30 with a new report on when Apple users will be able to stop this location tracking on their iPhones.
Apple’s next iPhone update promises a number of game-changing improvements, including a much more comprehensive set of Apple Intelligence features and the option to change default messaging, phone and other apps. But while all of this has big security and privacy considerations, Apple has also quietly decided to update a secret tracking feature on your iPhone, and you should change your settings once iOS 18.2 goes live.
I’ve warned before about the hidden dangers with location metadata embedded in photos you take with your phone. While this helps search your photo album by location, it also provides those you send those photos with an insight into your life that you might not want to share. You now have the option to completely disable this metadata capture or remove it photo by photo, many social media apps also remove this metadata anyway, when you share photos. But that is about to change.
ESET’s Jake Moore warns that “people often don’t realize how much data is hidden within a simple photo. Metadata holds a staggering wealth of information hidden beneath an image, some of which can be personal data such as location that can be used to identify you along with other information often found online.”
With iOS 18.2, as reported by beta testers ahead of next month’s stable release, you can now go to the photo settings under Privacy & Security and turn off app-by-app location sharing. So while you may want to keep your photos intact when sharing them using certain apps, anything you use more widely with more people should turn this off. If you have children with phones, you should turn this off completely.
Don’t expect this to be a universal feature when it launches, but most of the apps you use regularly to share images will be in that list of options with the keys you need. Others will come as they update their apps for the new OS version. In the meantime, only share photos using an app like WhatsApp that removes metadata.
“It’s quite disturbing that it has taken Apple this long to offer the option of removing this from public view,” says Moore. Meanwhile, and for complete privacy, “to share images with the confidence that no personal data will be captured, take a picture of the image before sending it – although this will reduce the quality of the image”.
Once iOS 18.2 is relaunched and this new feature works as intended, there will be no need to take screenshots or strip image-by-image of the gif metadata to share them securely. But the wait for that update now seems to be longer than expected.
As reported by The Cult of the Macwhile “a rumor from early November said that the iOS 18.2 release day would be the week of December 2nd, but that is now impossible. There are steps that need to be taken before the operating system is introduced and not all of them have happened yet. The release is likely to be in the second week of December… Apple doesn’t just finish work on major OS updates and roll them out all at once. The company deploys these wisely through beta testing.”
That said, it’s inevitable, and while improvements to Apple Intelligence, including “including Genmoji, Image Playground and more” will generate all the excitement, from a security and privacy perspective, this new Photos update is long overdue.
As for Apple’s next steps, The Cult of the Mac predicts that “The Release Candidate will almost certainly be released on Monday, December 2. This makes Monday, December 9 the most likely launch date for iOS 18.2. And this fits with Apple’s regular habits – iOS 18 and iOS 18.1 were released on Mondays.”
I completely agree with Moore—it’s surprising that this tracking update wasn’t made sooner, given the clear privacy implications around inadvertently sharing your location.