Latest iOS 13.3.1 Beta Includes Toggle for Disabling U1 Ultra Wideband Chip

[Unregistered 4U]

If a user disables location services, they have every expectation to believe that disable location services means exactly that, disable location services. It clearly didn't and that was the point of contention.

From the Krebs report:
”the device still seeks the user’s location when each app and system service is set to “never” request location information (but with the main Location Data service still turned on).”

So, if a user turned off the main Location Data service at the TOP of the page, then that’s what happened, it disabled location data. If a user did anything other than turn off the main Location Data service, then a user hasn’t turned off Location Data services.

So, this would primarily affect folks that wanted to leave Location Data services on, BUT then scroll alllll the way down and have the System Service set to Never. I think it’s more that a logical inconsistency was resolved rather than the system not doing what was intended.
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I agree and it should be a separate option for each and instead of across the board.

Nothing gets disabled. I’m actually running the beta, flipped the switch and still have bluetooth and wifi.

Latest iOS 13.3.1 Beta Includes Toggle for Disabling U1 Ultra Wideband Chip

It does not disable Bluetooth and/or wireless

forums.macrumors.com

i wanted to call out this part, though.
“If a user doesn’t want their location to be tracked they should have the option of only disabling Ultra Wideband without also having to disable both Bluetooth and WiFi.”
A user that REALLY doesn’t want to be tracked will turn off not only the Location Data service, but both Wifi and Bluetooth as well. Any signal a device sends out can be used to track that device.

 

[elkhound]

I don’t want to use this chip and I appreciate that they are letting us turn it off. I wish the neural engine were also a chip that I could turn off. Every time I see that it’s been snooping around in my pictures again, I want to open my phone, find the little beast, and gouge its eyes out with a sharp object. I think it’s strange that Apple forces face recognition and other artificial intelligence intrusions upon us. It’s an invasion on my privacy, even if it’s only phycological.

 

[amartinez1660]

Wanted to add that a device, wether inside or outside of Apple’s or any ecosystem, is actually always tracked no matter what, this person said it right:

A user that REALLY doesn’t want to be tracked will turn off not only the Location Data service, but both Wifi and Bluetooth as well. Any signal a device sends out can be used to track that device.

On the Joe Rogan / Edward Snowden podcast episode, he explains how network communications work, how each device has an unique identifier worldwide and how that’s used to tell who’s message, data blob, voice chunk, etc goes from or to. A comms tower needs to be able to pick up hundreds or thousands of these, arrange them, split-send them to the correct other antenna locations that also handles hundreds or thousands of unique tracked phones in their respective areas.
And it could be said “but it’s just a number, not my name”, but it’s matched anyways to your name. The reason why a phone bill can charge you that extra international text message? We are being tracked. The data plan usage left to the bytes precision? We are being tracked. If you don’t use your phone, still tracked, an antenna also needs to know that an info blob IS NOT for you.
He says that even turning it off as long as there’s battery left it might still go on, maybe queueing receiving info to be displayed for when it’s fully on.
The worst part is: since the invention of consumer networked communications, phone companies have been tracking, storing source and target phone calls, matching them and leaving them there for further use without any sort of discrimination or regulatory rules. Decades before 9/11. That’s, I suppose, is indeed one of the whistles he sounded.
All in the corresponding Joe Rogan episode, worth a read.

 

[TitsLegendary]

Does anyone know what sort of real world performance difference we will see if we disable it compared to keeping it enabled?

 

[Duane Martin]

I don’t want to use this chip and I appreciate that they are letting us turn it off. I wish the neural engine were also a chip that I could turn off. Every time I see that it’s been snooping around in my pictures again, I want to open my phone, find the little beast, and gouge its eyes out with a sharp object. I think it’s strange that Apple forces face recognition and other artificial intelligence intrusions upon us. It’s an invasion on my privacy, even if it’s only phycological.

First, use the default spell check. Second, if you don’t want a smartphone, don’t buy a smartphone. All of this is done on your phone, it doesn’t leave your phone, so how is it possibly an invasion of privacy? If you have psychological issues with this, get help. How could Apple, or anyone, possibly anticipate every possible psychological issue?

And this is such a non-issue. The claim that this particular use of location services drains your battery in any significant way is unsubstantiated; seriously, show me this one function makes more than 1 second difference in a day and I would be shocked. The fact the location information doesn’t leave your phone makes the invasion of privacy argument moot. And the argument that Apple should have explained this to everyone in the first place ignores the fact it is a complete non-issue that, despite being now explained in full, a significant number of MR readers still can’t grasp the basics.

PLEASE STOP demanding that Apple anticipate every paranoid delusion.

 

[I7guy]

Seems like a strawman argument that is being put forward.

ini, unless your in the know about the innards of ios, you can’t make a determination about whether this is a “straw man”.

We need location data on to comply with regulation. I bet it only needs to be on a few times a day to comply if that. For example, if it never needs to be turned off in Australia, then Apple only needs to know my location say once a day. I am most likely reading the story wrong but looks like Apple are saying it needs to be on quite often.

Location is needed to turn off the chip. The only way ios knows your location is to turn on location tracking. Chicken and eggs.

 

[goobot]

Because no software company can find and fix all bugs. When the software is released to the public is when they find a lot of the bugs because there’s more users

These aren’t bugs.

 

[gnasher729]

This strikes me as a cop out on Apple’s part. If a user doesn’t want their location to be tracked they should have the option of only disabling Ultra Wideband without also having to disable both Bluetooth and WiFi. Right now it’s only used in iOS to enhance Airdrop’s accuracy. I know Apple has big plans for it in the future but if they are truly a company that puts privacy first they’d allow users to shut it off while leaving Bluetooth and WiFi on and let the user decide if they care about the features that won’t work without it.

It doesn’t disable Bluetooth and WiFi. It affects their performance. For example, without location data your iPhone cannot know that you are in the office and cannot know which WiFi routers to expect.
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It would be nice to see a report of who was sent an iphones location given its current settings so as to be able to decide which to toggle, too much to ask?

There’s no need to send it anywhere. Much easier for your phone to download the information from a server and do the decision on the phone. Krebs’ tool showed that location data was read from the device, not that it was sent anywhere. If Apple sent that information anywhere, that would be quite disappointing.

 

[Khedron]

It would be fairer if Apple did this the same way that every other App has to now days - by regularly throwing up a reminder/nag screen that your location is being tracked!

Apple’s own apps and services should be subject the same rules as other Apps and not get special blanket privileges to use location data. It’s only fair!

This is not at all an abuse of their position, because Apple were clever enough to force you to pre-agree to all current and future decisions made by Apple Inc. when first activating your phone

 

[I7guy]

This is not at all an abuse of their position, because Apple were clever enough to force you to pre-agree to all current and future decisions made by Apple Inc. when first activating your phone

Correct, I’ll wager most EULa/TOS language basically stacks the deck as stated above.

However for the majority who want to use Apple products the language is a non-issue.

But thanks for pointing that out.?

 

[techfreak23]

Meanwhile, still no support for the Series 2 Xbox Elite Controller that came out early November... literally just need to add it to the whitelist of Bluetooth devices.

 

[bsolar]

This is not at all an abuse of their position, because Apple were clever enough to force you to pre-agree to all current and future decisions made by Apple Inc. when first activating your phone

It doesn't matter what I agree if the contract clauses are not conform to what can be legally binding in my jurisdiction in the first place. Many EULA clauses are not.

 

[dwaite]

It would be fairer if Apple did this the same way that every other App has to now days - by regularly throwing up a reminder/nag screen that your location is being tracked!

Which Apple App is doing this tracking?
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Seems like a strawman argument that is being put forward.
We need location data on to comply with regulation. I bet it only needs to be on a few times a day to comply if that. For example, if it never needs to be turned off in Australia, then Apple only needs to know my location say once a day. I am most likely reading the story wrong but looks like Apple are saying it needs to be on quite often.

I'm not sure what you mean - they obviously aren't continuously querying location for the U1 chip.

 

[57004]

I don’t want to use this chip and I appreciate that they are letting us turn it off. I wish the neural engine were also a chip that I could turn off. Every time I see that it’s been snooping around in my pictures again, I want to open my phone, find the little beast, and gouge its eyes out with a sharp object. I think it’s strange that Apple forces face recognition and other artificial intelligence intrusions upon us. It’s an invasion on my privacy, even if it’s only phycological.

Just wondering: How do you know it's been looking at your pictures? I haven't had an iPhone since the 6 so I genuinely don't know. I have my objections to such features as well.

 

[I7guy]

I don’t want to use this chip and I appreciate that they are letting us turn it off. I wish the neural engine were also a chip that I could turn off. Every time I see that it’s been snooping around in my pictures again, I want to open my phone, find the little beast, and gouge its eyes out with a sharp object. I think it’s strange that Apple forces face recognition and other artificial intelligence intrusions upon us. It’s an invasion on my privacy, even if it’s only phycological.

There are just things that cannot be shut off, but don’t go anywhere.

I personally hate that my isp logs my traffic and sends my location and phone calls to the NSA. IMO, what the little neural engine does is inconsequential and fun. YMMV.

 

[FlyingDutch]

Hardly unexpected, after the last official Apple statement.
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At this rate, the "Disable Features" screen is going to be longer than the "Settings" screen.

Ask serial whiners about that.
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I don’t want to use this chip and I appreciate that they are letting us turn it off. I wish the neural engine were also a chip that I could turn off. Every time I see that it’s been snooping around in my pictures again, I want to open my phone, find the little beast, and gouge its eyes out with a sharp object. I think it’s strange that Apple forces face recognition and other artificial intelligence intrusions upon us. It’s an invasion on my privacy, even if it’s only phycological.

Just wow ?

 

[PseudoRegister]

I'm curious about which governments ban UWB functionality. What is the point of that?

 

[elkhound]

Just wondering: How do you know it's been looking at your pictures? I haven't had an iPhone since the 6 so I genuinely don't know. I have my objections to such features as well.

There are several features I find annoying that cannot be turned off. Here are a few that come to mind but there are more. The camera app is also using a lot of AI that you cannot opt out of. Look up Deep Fusion.

Does facial recognition on every photo in your library. Then creates an album for each person it finds and adds every photo of that person to the album. It doesn’t know the name of the person unless you assign one.

Creates a database of what is in all your photos (boats, dogs, trees, etc.) which can then be searched.

Looks through all your photos and tries to figure out what you’ve been up to. If it detects something like a day at Disneyland, it will pick pictures it thinks are the best and make a movie out of them, complete with music.

Looks through all your pictures and picks a few it likes the best and shows them to you in a “For You” album it creates.

I’m an experienced photographer and prefer to organize photos myself.

 

[dampfnudel]

I wonder if this will have any positive impact to the horrendous bluetooth issues with iPhone 11 and 11 Pro models, with these phones failing to connect to non-Apple bluetooth devices, or dropping connections if they do manage to connect. My wife and I both have the 11 Pro Max, and it's honestly been very difficult to use these with our cars--as they only make the connections about 40% of the time.

iPhone 11 on iOS 13 having Bluetooth conn… - Apple Community

discussions.apple.com

It's at 98 pages...and still very active.

I hope Apple fixes this issue for the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro.

 

[I7guy]

There are several features I find annoying that cannot be turned off. Here are a few that come to mind but there are more. The camera app is also using a lot of AI that you cannot opt out of. Look up Deep Fusion.

Does facial recognition on every photo in your library. Then creates an album for each person it finds and adds every photo of that person to the album. It doesn’t know the name of the person unless you assign one.

Creates a database of what is in all your photos (boats, dogs, trees, etc.) which can then be searched.

Looks through all your photos and tries to figure out what you’ve been up to. If it detects something like a day at Disneyland, it will pick pictures it thinks are the best and make a movie out of them, complete with music.

Looks through all your pictures and picks a few it likes the best and shows them to you in a “For You” album it creates.

I’m an experienced photographer and prefer to organize photos myself.

I understand wanting to turn it off, but I like the cataloging that goes on behind the scenes. Not turning this feature off is part of Apple minimalism.