Will Apple face a new privacy storm when it launches iOS 7? It feels like the dark clouds are looming above, for it’s been revealed that when it’s rolled out, iOS 7 will keep track of and display all of the locations that iPhone users have visited in the past. The new feature hasn’t been officially announced, but a spokesperson has apparently confirmed it in a statement to BuzzFeed. If true, there’s likely to be a lot of sensationalist reporting about the ‘feature’ playing on consumer’s unfamiliarity with how location-technology featurs work.

As Charlie Wazel of BuzzFeed reports:

“For iOS 7 (expected to be released to the public in September) users, that information is about to become much more accessible, as one Hacker News commenter pointed out this morning. Using iOS 7 Beta 5, the user noticed that anyone with enabled “location services” can easily access their “frequent locations,” in iOS 7’s privacy settings. The result is a mapped history of the places you’ve been since installing the operating system. Apple confirmed to BuzzFeed that this is a consumer feature for iOS 7 and not a developer-only setting.”

We should note that we only have BuzzFeed’s word on this so far – there has been nothing official from Apple, and so the feature may or may not be included in iOS 7 when it’s finally released. However, if and when the feature is confirmed, we can expect to see a flood of sensationalist reporting about how your privacy is being exposed, much like we did back in 2011 when the “Apple locationgate” scandal first broke with this story in Radar.

Back then it was revealed to the masses for the first that Apple iPhones and iPads were regularly recording the location of those devices and saving them in a hidden file, creating a long list of locations and time stamps. Of course this is a standard practice of many web companies, such as Google and Facebook, nowadays, but at the time people were genuinely concerned, not realizing why Apple was collecting such data – hence the storm of sensationalist news at the time.

But these days, we now we know exactly why companies collect this kind of data – location-based, highly targeted ads have become a Holy Grail of sorts for companies that build their fortunes on the back of advertising, and so it’s pretty obvious why they’re doing. What’s more, most people don’t even seem that bothered, and indeed are happy to update their location on sites like Facebook.

Nevertheless, Apple’s latest move – which is actually nothing new, it’s always collected data on your location, only now you will be able to see that data for the first time – will probably scare some people. Or at least, the media will try to spin the news to scare people, as Adam Clark Estes on Gizmodo has already done:

“Creepy new feature alert! Creepy new feature alert! Buried in the Settings menu of the latest beta version of iOS 7 is the somewhat unsettling ability to see everywhere you’ve been since upgrading the operating system. It makes you wonder: Who else can see these maps?”

With reporting like this – and a great deal more to come if and when the feature is confirmed – people will definitely be scared, but Apple can actually turn this thing around in its favour by playing the transparency card to reassure users that their data is sacred. The feature will apparently be both opt-in and disable-able, and Apple needs to make sure it stays this way, whilst making sure it also retains existing privacy controls that allow people to turn off their location settings if they don’t want to be tracked.