Apple is way behind here and Nokia has some of the best location software and databases in the industry from its 2007 Navteq deal.

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Once the user's location is known, existing demographic databases, which have been honed over the years to reveal what kinds of people live where, can be brought into play.

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Google and Apple responded by saying that users can turn location tracking on their phones off, and that location sent back to their companies for the purposes of creating large crowd-sourced databases is anonymized.

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