Association of telemetry and location-bearing requests

Determine whether Apple associates long-lived geod telemetry session identifiers with location-bearing requests by matching request characteristics and source network information.

Background

The paper shows that telemetry records can potentially be matched to CoreRoutine requests using request size, request type, timing and source IP address, even without a shared identifier. Because telemetry session identifiers persist for several days, such matching could link telemetry to precise-location requests over time. The measurements cannot establish whether Apple actually performs this association.

References

We do not know whether Apple makes this association, and indeed it seems unlikely that it does, but we note that the possibility exists.

— Decoding What iOS Location Services Send to Apple: An LLM Is an Unreliable Analyst but a Useful Toolmaker  (2610.21597 - Leith, 15 Oct 2026) in Section 3.4.2, “Session Identifiers”