iOS 13 has a nasty location privacy bug

There’s a lot to love about Apple’s new iOS 13 operating system, which launched (September 30, 2019) and ships on the new iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro. However, we’ve spotted a nasty location privacy bug users should be aware of. It appears iOS 13 is not respecting the “Location” privacy setting users select for certain apps.

In the video below, you can see we try to tell iOS 13 to never allow Facebook to access our location, but iOS 13 doesn’t honor this setting, instead changing it back to “Ask Next Time” no matter how many times we attempt to select “Never.”

To be clear, this does not seem to be a Facebook app bug–it does appear to be a bug with iOS 13 itself. We’ve discovered other apps where this same problem occurs. However, there are just as many apps where iOS 13’s location privacy settings work as they should.

An iOS app developer has told us this bug has been reported to Apple and it should be fixed in iOS 13.1, which is scheduled to launch on Tuesday. Until then, be aware not all of your location privacy settings may be being respected by iOS 13.