iOS 26 landed in September with a long list of headlining features -- Liquid Glass, call screening, Apple Intelligence updates -- but tucked away into the Maps app is a tool that deserves a closer look before you tap through the setup prompts. Visited Places is a new feature that logs the restaurants, shops, parks and landmarks you physically visit, organizing them into a searchable history you can browse by date, category or city. Apple says the data is end-to-end encrypted and inaccessible to the company, but if you'd rather your iPhone not keep a running log of your movements, here's how to disable it.
This feature could be useful if you want to remember a restaurant or store you visited a few weeks ago. Apple promises (PDF) that it can't access these locations, and you can delete them from the app if you want. But if you don't want Maps to maintain a history of where you've been, you don't need to.
After you update to iOS 26, Maps will prompt you to enable this feature. You can decline, but if you accept and change your mind later, here's how to disable Visited Places in your Maps app.
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Disable Visited Places in Maps
1. Open Settings.
2. Tap Apps.
3. Tap Maps.
4. Tap Location.
5. Tap the toggle next to Visited Places.
Now your Maps app won't detect and log locations you visit.
When I arrived at this menu for the first time, I couldn't tap the toggle to disable Visited Places. However, when I disabled and re-enabled the toggle for Precise Location in the same menu, I could then tap the Visited Places toggle to disable it.
There's also a toggle in this menu for Preferred Routes & Predicted Destinations. According to Apple, if this feature is enabled it can learn your driving patterns and destinations, and then it can let you know if there's a delay on your route and offer detours. If you don't want this feature to learn your driving patterns, tap the toggle to turn it off.
Delete previous Visited Places
If you don't mind the Visited Places feature, but want to delete individual entries, go into Maps > Places > Visited Places. You can then swipe left on individual locations and tap the trash can icon to delete them one by one. If you want to trash the whole list, tap Clear History near the bottom of the menu.
For more on iOS 26, here's my review of the OS, how to reduce the Liquid Glass effects in the update and how to enable call screening on your iPhone. You can also check out our iOS 26 cheat sheet. For a longer read, you might want to check out this deep dive into how your iPhone isn't listening to you, but the truth is even worse.
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Correction, Sept. 30: An earlier version of this story misstated that Visited Places is on by default. You have to enable this feature on your device.
