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Apple Maps May Be Logging Places You Visit – How to Disable

I’m an Apple super fan through and through — Macs, iPads, iPods, iPhones, and just about every accessory in the ecosystem. That said, when it comes to navigation, the OG in my book is still Waze. Apple Maps and Google Maps are fine if you just want to get from point A to point B after entering a destination, but Waze takes it a step further.





The always-on, crowd-sourced alerts (especially for police, hazards, and traffic) make a huge difference. It’s not just about directions; it’s about real-time, community-driven navigation that feels “alive” on the road. Apple Maps has improved a lot over the years, but for the “wow” factor, Waze still wins for me.
 
What I don’t understand is that I thought Apple Maps was always keeping some record of where I have gone because if I get in the car to drive somewhere on the same day of the week and roughly the same time it always suggested a destination in CarPlay.

When my son was in the NICU for 3 months after he was born the only place it would suggest was the hospital after a couple weeks of constantly driving there. And I never “routed” to the hospital — I just drove there cause it was 5 minutes from my house. So it must have tracked my location.
 
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The headline is really getting clickbaity. Apple has a new feature the is end to end encrypted....scary! What is happening.

So far it's been ok. A place I go often it had not logged which was surprising. But checking it out.
 
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turbineseaplane said:
Perhaps the article shouldn't use this as the main/first huge image?
Click to expand...

I agree entirely.

The non-mutilated version looks like this of course

1759431063768.png
 
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mvitale892 said:
... when it comes to navigation, the OG in my book is still Waze. ...
Click to expand...

I used to be a big Waze fan as well -- but all of its myriad bugs drove me batty, so I finally gave up on it. I've been living happily without those bugs, using Apple Maps, for quite awhile now. I would imagine many of those bugs have been fixed by now... but the last time I tried Waze, I realized that all of my muscle memory has changed over in favor of Apple Maps at this point.

So, ya know... I imagine that for most people, the preferred choice eventually becomes more a matter of muscle memory.
 
This is absolutely alarming and a serious privacy concern. I would never want to be faced with the horror of my own previous actions. How do I also disable the camera and the storing all my emails and texts? MacRumors to the rescue!
 
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jimscard said:
I used to use Waze all the time. It’s definitely better than Google Maps is, but the only thing that keeps it still on my iPhone is Waze’s support for HOV/HOT lanes, which Apple Maps just doesn’t seem to know about.

Otherwise, things like the inclusion of stop signs and traffic lights (and buildings) on the map while driving, and the much better turn instructions “Stay in the left two lanes and go through this light, then turn left at the next light” is so much better than “In 450 feet turn left”
Click to expand...
That and the police 👮‍♀️ notifications. I know Apple Maps offers that also but I’ve never even seen a police speed trap on Apple Maps. See them all the time on Waze.
 
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nt5672 said:
A road map. Seriously, we recently tried to use Apple Maps for a multi-day drive across country and it absolutely sucked.

Why?

1. Could not search for restaurants while using maps for navigation.
2. Could not select alternate routes when using maps for navigation.
3. Did not show interstate rest areas.
4. Did not show distance and travel time between planned stops.
5. When not navigating still did not find the restaurants we were interested in and there was no way to tell maps what we were interested in without using names, which we did not know.
6. Did not show the gas stations we were interested in.
7. Would not reliably show all parks, it showed some, and ignored others.
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Interesting, because I'm able to do all those things in Maps on my iPhone with no issues.
 
i have no idea why most of us don't have the same Menu as is shown in the Macrumors article, but regarding allowing your iPhone to track your "Significant Places":
if you want to be able to turn on the safety feature of Stolen Device Protection, you will need to allow it to track your Significant Places.
this is the reason why i have turned on Significant Places tracking on my iPhone.
with this on, i have up to 60 minutes to lock my iPhone if it gets stolen so that no one can change anything of significance on it including my apple account ID or other key things.
its also useful if your spouse or your aged parent loses their phone or it gets stolen. if they have it enabled, you would have up to an hour to lock their phone for them if it was set up for you to do that for them.

criminals who steal your phone know that they have the best chance to do damage to you if they only need the few minutes it takes them to get into an alley to change the settings on yr phone. with this feature turned on, you yourself have up to an hour to lock your phone. my advice: turn on this feature.
i have my own set to allow me to change anything i want if i am at home. you can also set it to not allow significant changes anywhere, including if you are even at your home (but thats a bit draconian).
 
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As if any of those options or toggles matter. That info goes straight to Apple and they store that indefinitely, just like every other tech company.
 
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MacRumors said:


In iOS 26, Apple Maps has a feature called Visited Places that when enabled automatically logs where you've been, with the aim of making it easier to revisit your favorite spots or to share locations with friends.

What Is Visited Places?

Visited Places keeps a record of locations you've visited, organizing them by category such as restaurants, shops, or transit stops. The feature is end-to-end encrypted, so Apple can't read your data, and it syncs across all your Apple devices signed into the same account.

You can search your visited places by name, date, or category, add personal notes, and even save locations to custom guides.
Click to expand...

I have had the history enabled on Google Maps for years, because I like the possibility of retracing where I have been and when. I don't see why should I disable it in Apple Maps.
 
This is funny, because I actually like that this feature is back, albeit worse than before, not that it exists.

Reminder: This is not remotely a new feature, just that it is visible in Maps. This tracking has existed in iOS for a very long time. Prior to I think iOS 15, if Significant Locations was enabled (or whatever it was called at the time), iOS tracked and stored all locations and what times you were there, but the only way to see that data was buried and not readily visible--WAY down in Settings, about four levels down in Privacy under Location Services.

Just about nobody knew it was even there, but for people like me--who have a bad memory and sometimes find it extremely useful when filling out work documentation to have their phone remind them where they were on what day and for how long--it was incredibly useful.

Then in I believe iOS 15, they removed the ability to see anything but the past day's worth of data, which was maddening as someone who used it regularly. I needed to install a 3rd party app (I use DayOne) and give it explicit permission to access that data, at which point it starts logging the same granular information the OS used to provide.

The new Maps feature, without needing to futz with DayOne or dig down into Settings, is really nice. It doesn't show arrival and leave times (nor does Settings after the past 24 hours), so I still need DayOne, but it's nice at-a-glance.
 
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Makosuke said:
This is funny, because I actually like that this feature is back, albeit worse than before, not that it exists.

Reminder: This is not remotely a new feature, just that it is visible in Maps. This tracking has existed in iOS for a very long time. Prior to I think iOS 15, if Significant Locations was enabled (or whatever it was called at the time), iOS tracked and stored all locations and what times you were there, but the only way to see that data was buried and not readily visible--WAY down in Settings, about four levels down in Privacy under Location Services.

Just about nobody knew it was even there, but for people like me--who have a bad memory and sometimes find it extremely useful when filling out work documentation to have their phone remind them where they were on what day and for how long--it was incredibly useful.

Then in I believe iOS 15, they removed the ability to see anything but the past day's worth of data, which was maddening as someone who used it regularly. I needed to install a 3rd party app (I use DayOne) and give it explicit permission to access that data, at which point it starts logging the same granular information the OS used to provide.

The new Maps feature, without needing to futz with DayOne or dig down into Settings, is really nice. It doesn't show arrival and leave times (nor does Settings after the past 24 hours), so I still need DayOne, but it's nice at-a-glance.
Click to expand...
This is exactly me, too! I love significant locations, visited places, and the Google Maps timeline. I remember, in fact, looking back at the significant locations list every once in a while, because the data is interesting to me.

For Google’s timeline feature specifically, I love using it to look back on the restaurant I went to a month ago that I’ve since forgotten, or figuring out how long I was at a certain place, how long it took me to get there, and the photos that I took there on that day.

How do you use Day One to get arrival and departure times? Also, Day One the journaling app?
 
Good article. Glad to see that there is an option to turn it off. Not yet decided on whether I should disable it on my new 17 Pro Max.
 
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Dj64Mk7 said:
This is exactly me, too! I love significant locations, visited places, and the Google Maps timeline. I remember, in fact, looking back at the significant locations list every once in a while, because the data is interesting to me.
[...]
How do you use Day One to get arrival and departure times? Also, Day One the journaling app?
Click to expand...
Yes, Day One the journaling app. I use only the free features that you get without a premium account, and in fact am not logged in at all (so it's 100% local, a critical feature to me), but that's enough to get the time/location tracking. If you give it permission to use precise location data, the "calendar" section will automatically populate with each location you are at, the arrival time, and how long you spent there (which indirectly gives you departure time). The location information shows up under the calendar view.

There are probably other apps that can do this for free, but Day One was recommended a few years ago when Apple stopped offering this in Settings, and it's continued to serve my needs well enough so far.

Of note, it does NOT populate this information backwards, only from whenever you give it permission. I suspect, but don't know for sure, that the way the OS handles precise location tracking is that it only stores the past day of data (which you can also see in Settings), then hangs on to less precise "place X was visited on date Y" data for longer (perpetual?). So an app like Day One can save that precision data and store it on its own, but it can't go back and pull out past date data.

That in fact bit me just this week, because I didn't realize I needed to give Day One permission again after migrating to a new phone, so when I went to check there was nothing for the couple weeks since I upgraded. Once I gave it permission again, it's now populating as it was before.

One thing I do not and would not use is Google for this; I simply don't trust what the company will do with any information I provide them, particularly something as valuable as precise location data. What they say they can or will do with it is better than a couple years ago, but they've lied repeatedly about how they use data, so I'm not taking any chances. Nor do I want any of that stored in the cloud in a non end-to-end encrypted form. That the Apple data is entirely on-device (other than cloud backups, which at least are end-to-end encrypted) is important to me, and using Day One without an account in theory also keeps everything there local.
 
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zarmanto said:
I used to be a big Waze fan as well -- but all of its myriad bugs drove me batty, so I finally gave up on it. I've been living happily without those bugs, using Apple Maps, for quite awhile now. I would imagine many of those bugs have been fixed by now... but the last time I tried Waze, I realized that all of my muscle memory has changed over in favor of Apple Maps at this point.

So, ya know... I imagine that for most people, the preferred choice eventually becomes more a matter of muscle memory.
Click to expand...
Not sure if it is still the case, but it used to be that Waze required location tracking to be enabled all the time, not just when "using the app".
 
Stetrain said:
"Apple Maps may be doing exactly the thing it said it would do in the dialog where it asked if you wanted to enable the feature"
Click to expand...
Wait you mean you should read those pop up windows that talk about changes and you can opt out of? Wow! Who knew reading was this tough.
 
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