Comment by withinboredom
1 month ago
Once upon a time, I worked for a pretty big company (fortune 500ish) and had access to production data. When a colleague didn't show up at work as they were expected, I looked up their location in our tracking database. They were in the wrong country -- but I can't finish this story here.
Needless to say, if an Apple employee wanted to stalk someone (say an abusive partner, creep, whatever), the fact that this stuff phones home means that the employee can deduce where they are located. I've heard stories from the early days of Facebook about employees reading partner's Facebook messages, back before they took that kind of stuff seriously.
People work at these places, and not all people are good.
Your first story sounds like a good outcome.
I doubt Apple employees could deduce location from the uploaded data. Having worked at FB I know that doing something like that would very quickly get you fired post 2016
network topologies don't lie (usually). What I mean is, there are many ways to locate someone if you have enough visibility.
It depends on your position.