location

Although Apple was silent for several days after researchers raised issues about location information being stored on the iPhone, that wasn't because it was ignoring the issue.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs told Mobilized that the company wanted to figure out exactly what was and wasn't happening, and then figure out the best way to explain a complex set of issues to its customers.

"We're an engineering-driven company," Jobs said in a telephone interview today. "When people accuse us of things, the first thing we want to do is find out the truth. That took a certain amount of time to track all of these things down. And the accusations were coming day by day. By the time we had figured this all out, it took a few days. Then writing it up and trying to make it intelligible when this is a very high-tech topic took a few days. And here we are less than a week later."

During the phone interview, Jobs and Senior Vice Presidents Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall talked about what information the iPhone is and isn't collecting, some lessons learned, and the need for the industry to do a better job of explaining things to customers.

Jobs said that the company is leading the way when it comes to privacy and said Apple looks forward to testifying before any congressional inquiries on such issues. During the talk, the execs also touched briefly on the release of the long-delayed white iPhone. Also, Jobs declined to comment on when he might return full time to Apple.

Here is an edited transcript of the interview: … Read more

Following the location question-and-answer document Apple published earlier today, CEO Steve Jobs has gone on the record about the company's plans to answer inquiries made by government officials, including the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

"I think Apple will be testifying," Jobs said in an interview with All Things Digital. "They have asked us to come and we will honor their request of course."

Immediately following the discovery last week of the iOS database file containing time-stamped nearby cell tower, Wi-Fi, and GPS information, Apple was peppered with questions by prominent lawmakers over the company'… Read more

Researchers announced last week that they found what look like secret files on the iPhone that track user location and store it on the device, without the permission of the device owner. Apple has been collecting it in iOS products that carry a 3G antenna for nearly a year now to help create a crowd-sourced database that's able to help speed up location positioning.

Pete Warden, a writer, and Alasdair Allan, a senior research fellow in astronomy at the University of Exeter, discovered the log file and created a tool that lets users see a visualization of that data. Last week they said there was no evidence of that information being sent to Apple or anyone else, which Apple has now said it uses to build a large, anonymized database. That data was found to be unencrypted, giving anyone with access to your phone or computer where backups may be stored a way to grab the data.

A week later, Apple broke its silence to explicitly say that this data is not for the purposes of tracking where people are. Instead it's to help the company's devices zero in on their location using information from part of a larger database. Furthermore, Apple said a future software update would cut down the time this data was stored on the phone, and that it would be encrypted.

To help users understand more about the data that's being collected, what the risks are, and what they can do about it, CNET has put together this FAQ, which has been updated several times since it first published on April 20. You can also view Apple's response to the matter here, which was posted April 27. … Read more

Like Apple and Google, Microsoft collects records of the physical locations of customers who use its mobile operating system.

Windows Phone 7, supported by manufacturers including Dell, HTC, LG, Nokia, and Samsung, transmits to Microsoft a miniature data dump including a unique device ID, details about nearby Wi-Fi networks, and the phone's GPS-derived exact latitude and longitude.

A Microsoft representative was not immediately able to answer questions that CNET posed this afternoon, including how long the location histories are stored and how frequently the phone's coordinates are transmitted over the Internet. Windows Phone currently claims about a 6 … Read more

A lawsuit filed against Apple in Florida last week accuses the company of violating privacy laws, as well as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, by keeping a log of user locations without offering a way to disable the feature.

The suit, which was first reported by Bloomberg, was filed by Vikram Ajjampur and William Devito, both of whom own Apple products. In the suit, the pair, who seek punitive damages and injunctive relief, cite research from Alasdair Allen and Pete Warden about the tracking files found within iOS as the source for Apple's collection techniques.

"Users of … Read more

Citing a need to protect consumers' personal information online, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan is calling for a meeting with executives from Apple and Google to get more details on what the companies are doing with location information collected from consumer devices.

In a statement posted to Madigan's site and picked up by Reuters, letters from Madigan have been sent to both companies asking about what data is being kept and for how long. The attorney general also seeks to find out what that data is being used for.

"I want to know whether consumers have been informed … Read more

Apple has yet to officially respond to queries over the behind-the-scenes tracking behavior of some iOS devices including the iPhone and iPad. But that might have just changed based on the contents of an alleged e-mail response from Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

Responding to an e-mail from a reader of site MacRumors, and published by the site's authors, Jobs drops three big statements in three terse sentences:

Reader: Steve, Could you please explain the necessity of the passive location-tracking tool embedded in my iPhone? It's kind of unnerving knowing that my exact location is being recorded at all … Read more

Google acknowledged today that it collects location information from Android devices, but downplayed concerns about privacy by saying the information is not "traceable to a specific user."

That claim, it turns out, depends on the definition of "traceable."

According to detailed records provided to CNET by a security researcher, Android phones regularly connect to Google.com and disgorge a miniature data dump that includes time down to the millisecond, current and recent GPS coordinates, nearby Wi-Fi network addresses, and two 16-letter strings representing a device ID that's unique to each phone.

Apple, which came under fire this week … Read more

Want to wipe location-tracking data that's being stored on your iPhone without your permission? There's an app for that, but you've got to jailbreak your iPhone first.

Several tools have cropped up as a fix for people riled up about the fact that iPhones (and iPads) are surreptitiously logging unencrypted location-related data on the device, including cell tower coordinates, time stamps, cell operator and Wi-Fi networks used, and longitude and latitude from GPS signals--basically a when-and-where of your phone's location going back at least a year.

Police have known about and been using this information, and cellular operators have access to it and can provide it when served with a court order. But anyone with physical access to the phone (and access to a desktop backup of the data) is now able to see an iPhone owner's whereabouts over time.

The fact that consumers don't realize that their phones are recording and storing this information in clear text has come as a big surprise to many people, including consumer advocates who say it's a big privacy violation.

You can hide the data that may be on your desktop by encrypting your iTunes backups. And you can turn off GPS to stop the logging of at least that information, but that doesn't clean up any data stored on the device, and it will severely limit use of the device for location-based services like mapping. There is no way to disable the tracking, because it's baked into the operating system. … Read more