Tech giant Apple has published a lengthy Q&A document on its website outlining the controversial iPhone tracking issue and defending the company from any wrongdoing, following days of speculation after researchers discovered files that record a phone’s movements.
Chief executive Steve Jobs has also told the Wall Street Journal that “we haven’t been tracking anyone”, answering questions in an interview and confirming the company will be testifying before Congress.
Apple said in its new statement that while it hasn’t been tracking users’ locations, iPhones actually cache data that help the phone later on when it needs to use location-based services.
“The iPhone… is maintaining a database of WiFi 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.”
Apple explains that iPhones can reduce the time needed to use location-based services by using mobile phone tower data to triangulate the position of each user’s iPhone. It says that the location data recorded on the device is not the user’s location, “but rather the location of WiFi hotspots and cell towers”.
Apple claims it cannot locate users based on those geo-tagged WiFi hotspots or mobile phone tower data. However, it also says that it doesn’t need to store as much data as the iPhones currently do, and a software update will be released to fix this problem.
“We don’t think the iPhone needs to store more than seven days of this data,” it says. “The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we uncovered and plan to fix shortly.”
The company says that sometime in the next few weeks, Apple will release an iOS update that “reduces the size of the crowd-source WiFi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone… ceases backing up this cache and deletes this cache entirely when Locations services is turned off”.
Senior vice president Scott Forstall claims Apple needs to use the iPhones to cache this data, instead of using external servers. But he also says the company has learned some lessons during the past week, including that the size of the cache file was too large and could hold too much data.
Jobs says the industry as a whole has done a bad job of educating customers in what different types of technology actually do.
“As new technology comes into the society there is a period of adjustment and education. 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. I think the right time to educate people is when there is no problem.”
This isn’t the first time a major tech company has been scrutinised over privacy issues – last year internet giant Google faced massive backlash over its Street View program.
But Telsyte research director Foad Fadaghi says despite the seriousness of the issue, this won’t hurt the company in the long-term.
“There are always going to be challenges with the perception people have of companies, and the amount of trust they give. But I think people continue to use services every day, and… it’s something people tend to overlook.”
“Although, without a doubt it does raise some concerns for the general population. It still represents an issue that probably shouldn’t have happened.”
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
