The iPad kept a record of your locations ONBOARD , never sending it anywhere. The 4.3.3 fixes the tracking concern.
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Only sort of true. What happened was the iPad downloaded a bunch of location data for your location, cell towers, wifi spots, etc. It used this to supplement the GPS (if you have one) for quicker location service, or your only location service if you were using WiFi only.
So, in a general way the iPad was recording where you went, but only by recoding the sites that were near you. According to Apple, those site could be up to 300 miles away. I'm thinking that was rare. More likely you would see stuff within 50 miles, that being about as far a the average cell tower can cover.
One problems with this were that the database never purged. It just kept getting bigger. This provided the interesting location plots that were showing up on the internet. You could tell everywhere you cell phone had been since it was activated. When you looked closely you could see it wasn't particularly accurate. You could tell that you'd visited downtown Chicago, but not any place that you actually went.
Apple said this was bug. They never intended the database to keep data indefinitely. With the 4.3.3 update they limited the size of the database. I don't remember the specifics.
The second problem was that the database got backed up whenever you backed up the iPad in iTunes, and it was un-encrypted. That meant that nay one who got access to your computer could plot where your phone had been (in broad terms) since the day you got it.
Again, the 4.3.3 update fixed this. The database is no longer backed up.
The database on the phone is encrypted, and it is not available for other apps to use (though I suppose a jailbreak phone app might). It might be possible for someone who has access to your phone to view the database, but it would be of little use to criminals, because of it's general nature, and the law has other legal recourses to find out exactly where you phone has been.
Apple made a third change. If you turn off location services altogether the database is removed. Of course, with locations services off your location aware apps, like Maps, become considerably less useful.
Anyway, Apple was not saving your location data on the phone. It was uploading the most relevant parts of it's location database to the phone, to improve how well your phone's location services work.
That's not to say Apple never get's or stores your phone's location data. They do. But they do not associate the data with your phone. The phone occasionally (Apple hasn't specified when or how that I know of) sends Apple GPS coordinates and the wifi and cell towers it can see at those coordinates. Your ID is not sent or stored with that information.
This is one of the ways that Apple creates and maintains the location database that it uploads to the phone. Ironic that it was the return and use of this information that caused all the hoopla, and not the collecting of it in the first place.