Apple does not intentionally collect and distribute your entire location history. It is meant as a cache to make location based services load faster based off previous locations. There are hacks for jailbroken devices which disable this but if you use GPS or anything it causes a much more significant lag when trying to acquire a lock. As far as I have heard, the fact that "consolidated.db" (an sqlite database file) is not properly culled of old data is a bug that may have accidentally gone overlooked.
Android also does this, however.
Every time you change cell towers, your carriers log this info.