Apple has responded to criticism over the way the iPhone stores details of its location and copies the data to a Mac or PC.
In a statement on its website, the company said ‘Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.’ The statement added that ‘The location data that researchers are seeing on the iPhone is not the past or present location of the iPhone, but rather the locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers surrounding the iPhone’s location, which can be more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone. We plan to cease backing up this cache in a software update coming soon.’
The company did, however, admit that a bug in the iPhone’s software meant that up to a year’s worth of location data was being stored, rather than the intended seven days. Another bug causes the iPhone to update location data when Location Services is switched off. Both these bugs will be fixed in an upcoming Software Update, said Apple.
Apple’s comments, provided in the form of a Q&A, also gave details on how the iPhone records and caches locations data: ‘The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested.’
Using GPS data alone to calculate location would take several minutes, according to Apple, and by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data it was able to reduce that time to a few seconds.
All the data recorded and stored is anonymous, according to the statement.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital, Steve Jobs admitted that Apple, along with the rest of the technology industry, was partly to blame for the controversy. ‘We haven’t–as an industry–done a very good job educating people, I think, as to some of the more subtle things going on here. As such, (people) jumped to a lot of wrong conclusions in the last week,’ he said.
Jobs also confirmed during the interview that Apple would be attending next week’s Senate sub-committee hearing: ‘I think Apple will be testifying. They have asked us to come and we will honor their request, of course,’ he said.
