Apple: “We’re Not Tracking the Location of Your iPhone” [Apple's Official Statement on the iPhone Tracking Issue is That Data is Not Being Used for Tracking Purposes]

Posted on TFTS by J. Angelo Racoma on Wednesday, 27. April 2011 under: Mobile/Cell Phones, PCs, Notebooks, Netbooks & Tablets

Apple has published its official stance on the iPhone tracking issue. In short, Apple is saying they’re not guilty of any location tracking. Instead, the data is just being used to improve location-based services.

iPhone tracking map

Mobile platforms have recently come under fire because of systems that can potentially track user locations. Both Apple’s iOS–which runs the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch–and Google’s Android OS have been found to store cellsite and Wi-Fi hotspot data and send data back to Apple and Google servers, respectively.

Apple has just released its official statement on the matter, and basically says they’re not tracking the location of your iPhone.

Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.

Apple says that the record of cellsites and Wi-Fi hotspots is simply a cache used by iPhones to improve the performance of location-based services. If location services were to rely on GPS alone, this would require a few minutes of syncing with GPS satellites, and will require line-of-sight. Instead, the iPhone stores a “subset cache” of a crowdsourced database that Apple has been collecting over the years, which the phone uses to determine its location, on top of GPS.

While Apple’s statement admits that the data is being transmitted back to Apple servers, they say this is being done in “an anonymous and encrypted form,” and that “Apple cannot identify the source of this data.” The cache is not encrypted, although it is restricted. It is backed up by iTunes, and encryption will depend on your iTunes settings.

Apple also admits that the fact that data is being updated even with location services turned off is a bug that they will be addressing in an update.

You can check out the source link for Apple’s statement, in Q&A form. With Apple’s official response, do you think Apple’s response to the privacy issue is adequate? Are they trying to pussyfoot around the situation? What about Steve Jobs’ alleged response, in which he says Apple doesn’t collect location data?

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