By: Aseem Gaurav, April 27, 2011 (New Delhi)
Apple has finally broken its silence over claims that it was tracking the locations of iPhone users in a hidden file, stating "Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone.”
“Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so," the company said in a statement.
Apple said it is planning to rectify "bugs" that resulted in location data being unencrypted and stored for up to a year.
According to Apple, the iPhone was not logging a user’s location but instead gathering location information to maintain a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in the user’s vicinity to “enable an iPhone to rapidly calculate its location when requested.” It said that its approach can slash the process of calculating a phone's whereabouts to a few seconds.
Apple’s statement comes in wake of researchers raising privacy concerns that that iPhones and iPads were storing latitude and longitude coordinates along with a time stamp. It said the location as seen by the researchers 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."
It says that all location data sent to Apple is in an anonymous and encrypted format, and that it cannot identify the source of this data.
The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we uncovered and plan to fix shortly Apple blamed it is on a software bug for storing as much as a year of location data, and planning to fix it shortly with the release of a free iOS software update. It said the update will reduce the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone, ceasing backing up this cache, and deleting this cache entirely when the Location Services function is turned off.
Apple admitted that users should be able to turn off the location logging feature on their phone when they disable location services on it. But a bug prevented this, the company said.
Apple has been at the center of a privacy debate that’s sparked lawsuits from consumers and drawn inquiries from US Congress about whether their products breach privacy rules by tracking and storing users’ locations.
Apple has finally broken its silence over claims that it was tracking the locations of iPhone users in a hidden file, stating "Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone.”
“Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so," the company said in a statement.
Apple said it is planning to rectify "bugs" that resulted in location data being unencrypted and stored for up to a year.
According to Apple, the iPhone was not logging a user’s location but instead gathering location information to maintain a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in the user’s vicinity to “enable an iPhone to rapidly calculate its location when requested.” It said that its approach can slash the process of calculating a phone's whereabouts to a few seconds.
Apple’s statement comes in wake of researchers raising privacy concerns that that iPhones and iPads were storing latitude and longitude coordinates along with a time stamp. It said the location as seen by the researchers 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."
It says that all location data sent to Apple is in an anonymous and encrypted format, and that it cannot identify the source of this data.
The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we uncovered and plan to fix shortly Apple blamed it is on a software bug for storing as much as a year of location data, and planning to fix it shortly with the release of a free iOS software update. It said the update will reduce the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone, ceasing backing up this cache, and deleting this cache entirely when the Location Services function is turned off.
Apple admitted that users should be able to turn off the location logging feature on their phone when they disable location services on it. But a bug prevented this, the company said.
Apple has been at the center of a privacy debate that’s sparked lawsuits from consumers and drawn inquiries from US Congress about whether their products breach privacy rules by tracking and storing users’ locations.
