Apple officials say the company is not tracking iPhone and iPad
users but has admitted that excessive amounts of device location data have been
stored, due to a software glitch.
Apple has been under intense scrutiny from users, industry
observers and lawmakers for more than a week following the discovery
that its iPhones and iPads collect and store
location data about the whereabouts of its devices.
"Apple is not tracking the location of your
iPhone," Apple said in an April 27 statement. "Apple has never done
so and has no plans to ever do so."
Devices running its iOS 4 software have been keeping an
unencrypted cache of the data since the release of the OS in June 2010,
Apple said in the statement. The problem is a
software bug the
company has uncovered and a problem it plans
to fix shortly.
"We don't think the iPhone needs to store more than
seven days of this data," Apple explained.
What is the data and why is it being stored? According to
Apple, each iPhone is maintaining a database of WiFi hotspots and cell towers
in the user's location—though in some cases, these towers may be as far
as a hundred miles away—so that location information, when requested, can be
served up in a snap.
Apple continued:
Calculating a phone's location using just GPS satellite data
can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few
seconds by using WiFi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS
satellites, and even triangulate its location using just WiFi hotspot and cell
tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These
calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of
WiFi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of
iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby WiFi hotspots and cell
towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple.
Again, the portion of the location data stored on each
iPhone is not encrypted, though users could choose to encrypt it through the
user settings in their iTunes account. Of course, no one would have known to do
this, since no one realized the information was being stored in the first place.
"Users are confused," Apple continued in its odd
third-person tone, "partly because the creators of this new technology
(including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to
date."
Researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden announced that
Apple has been "maintaining a database" in an April 20 post on O'Reilly
Radar. While unsure of why it was being done, the
two confirmed it was "clearly intentional" and that the data
collection persisted even across device migrations. Warden, in a video on the
site, explained that since upgrading to iOS 4,
he'd been through three iPhones, but the log of his whereabouts had been
consistently maintained through that time.
“Anybody with access to
this file knows where you've been over the last year, since iOS 4 was
released," the pair wrote.
When users turn off Apple's Location Services feature,
iPhones sometimes continue to update the database, Apple conceded, again blaming
a software bug.
"It shouldn't," Apple said in the statement.
"This is a bug, which we plan to fix shortly."
Sometime in the next few weeks, Apple said it will release
an iOS software update that will reduce the size of the database cache store on
the iPhone, stop backing up this cache and delete the cache entirely when Location
Services is turned off. Additionally, the next major release of iOS will
encrypt the cache on the iPhone.
When some Apple customers were likewise upset following the
release of the iPhone 4, which suffered a loss of antenna strength when held a
certain way, Apple released a statement similarly distancing itself from the
problem and expressing surprise.
"Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the
formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is
totally wrong," it said in a July 2, 2010 statement. "Our formula, in
many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given
signal strength."
In addition to its location data clarification, Apple also
announced April 27 that the white
iPhone 4 will finally arrive April 28, and that later this week the iPad 2
will beginning shipping to Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and eight
additional new countries.
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