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Facebook Drains Your iPhone Battery Because It's Tracking Your Location: Report

Facebook Drains Your iPhone Battery Because It's Tracking Your Location: Report

By Indo Asian News Service | Updated: 17 October 2015 17:46 IST

Have you ever wondered as to why using Facebook drains your iPhone's battery like no other app? It is because the social networking platform is constantly tracking your location using your iPhone's GPS module.

Security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski analysed the Facebook app's code and found that the app is sending devices' location information to Facebook in the background, Motherboard.com reported.

"If you move around a lot, you are likely to use more battery but the combination of GPS and networking going on in the background is likely the majority cause of battery drain," Zdziarski was quoted as saying through email.

(Also see: Facebook Wants You to Spend All Your Time on Facebook)

However, this is not surprising as Facebook's in-app location settings clearly state that if you have location history and access set to "always", then Facebook "will build a history of our precise location, even when you are not using the app".

"We are not tracking background location if the location setting is off on your device or in the app," a Facebook spokesperson said.

Still, the idea of Facebook tracking you everywhere is bound to be an unsettling one for the more privacy-conscious, and thankfully there is an easy solution: turn your location settings off for Facebook.

"We are not collecting background location on iOS unless Location Access is set to Always on your device and you have enabled Location History in the Facebook app," the spokesperson reiterated.

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