The just-released iPhone software update has a bunch of headline features including Priority Notifications, new emoji, Sketch in Image Playgrounds and more, but iOS 18.4 also has some more under-the-radar changes.
As spotted by Mysk, iOS 18.4 adds a new setting buried in Location Services called ‘Improve Location Accuracy’. For some users, including myself, it was on by default. Here’s what Apple says this toggle does …
You can find this new setting by going to Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Location Services -> System Services and scrolling down to the ‘Product Improvement’ section. The ‘Improve Location Accuracy’ toggle joins the existing ‘iPhone Analytics’, ‘Routing & Traffic’, and ‘Improve Maps’.
Apple’s documentation for this new setting reads:
Your iPhone will periodically send the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and mobile phone masts (where supported by a device) in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple, to be used for augmenting this crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and mobile phone mast locations.
This sounds like it controls whether your device contributes to the assisted GPS system, which combines reading from GPS satellites with a list of known nearby detected Wi-Fi network and cell towers, in order to resolve a precise location for a user more quickly.
Turning off ‘Improve Location Accuracy’ does not mean your device cannot benefit from the crowd-sourced database. Rather, it seems to provide a way for you to opt-out of participating in it.
It’s unclear whether this behavior was previously incorporated as part of another setting, and has been explicitly broken out into a dedicated separate toggle. Or perhaps your device would always do this in the background, and now you have a way to explicitly opt-out.
If the setting is on, Apple says the data is sent to its server in an anonymized and encrypted fashion, such that there should be no privacy concerns for individuals.
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