Crowd-Sourcing Offered as an Excuse for Apple's Location Snooping
Sporting a few bruises, a less than shiny Apple responded to charges that it's been gathering location information about iPhone and iPad users. It also announced that a few fixes are in store and an update to the iOS will give users a new sense of relief that Apple is not out to act as Big Brother.
First off, Apple denied it was tracking each and every phone but instead was "crowd-sourcing" data from Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers and cacheing information that it received. The idea, they say was to get a representative sampling of groups of users, not to spy on individuals.
To the direct question of whether Apple was tracking an individual's iPhone, an Apple spokesman answered, "Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so." The reason everyone is so concerned is difficult to explain in a soundbite, Apple spokespeople continued. "Users are confused," they said, "partly because the creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date."
Apple insists it is not logging an individual's iPhone location. Instead it's maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which might be 100 miles away. Triangulating using GPS satellites, Wi-Fi hotspots and cell-tower date can help make using location-dependent apps work lightening fast. This geo-tagged information is also sent in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple. The crowd-sourced information is not stored on the iPhone, so Apple downloads a cached version to your iPhone, which is backed up every time you sync it with iTunes. Apple plans to cease backing up this cache in a software update coming soon.
Although there was a rumor that Apple was saving as much as a year of location data on phones, Apple say that's untrue. It's unclear where so much data was being saved, but Apple says the smaller cache that the iPhone was saving was still high due to a bug in the software, which will be fixed by a software update. There also was a bug that made the phone save info even when the Location Services were turned off. This also will be fixed by the updated software.
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