Apple: We’re Not Tracking Anyone, and We Never Will

Listen up, world. Steve has something he wants to say:

“Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.”

It doesn’t happen very often but Apple does, every once in a while, make a public statement about something that isn’t directly related to new product announcements.

It happened when people made a fuss about iPhone 4 reception troubles. And it happened when Steve Jobs stepped aside for six months to focus on his health.

Now it’s happened again, with a forthright statement about the iPhone tracking furore.

It all began with the release of iPhoneTracker, a Mac app that unlocked access to the location database backed up inside iTunes every time you sync your iPhone.

The masses were in uproar. “Apple is tracking us!” they cried. “It’s a conspiracy!”

Um, no, it’s not. Turns out, it’s a combination of misunderstanding and some software bugs. Today’s statement by Apple fixes both.

The location database wasn’t tracking your phone at all, the company says. You wanted location services for all your apps, so the phone has to know where it is. It keeps track of its own location using a mixture of GPS data, and known locations of cellphone towers and Wi-Fi hotspots.

That’s why the maps generated by iPhoneTracker often had blobs hundreds of miles away from where the phone had actually been. They are the phone’s attempts to get a rough guess of its location. The device is constantly working to find out where it is, so it can use that data for your location-tagged Angry Birds scores. Or something.

Forthcoming iOS software updates will do several things: fix the bugs, cease backing up the location database to your Mac, and slim it down on your phone. Further ahead, the next major release of iOS will encrypt the database on the phone.

So is this an apology? Sort of. Apple does say, early on:

“Users are confused, partly because the creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date.”

As we reported, none of this was new when iPhoneTracker came out. Alex Levinson had known about it for months, having written a book spelling out all the location data that could be found inside an iPhone and its backups. iPhoneTracker made the issue a bigger deal simply because it visualized it, turning abstract geekspeak about databases into pretty maps, which ended up plastered all over Flickr.

Suddenly this was an issue people could see, and that’s what caused all the fuss.

So, to sum up: Apple wasn’t tracking you. Your phone needs to know where it is so you can post geotagged status updates to Twitbook, or wherever you like to post things. There were some bugs. They’re going to be fixed. Keep calm, and carry on.

http://www.torontocitylife.com/ Gooder Talking Guy

Wow…I sure hope this was sarcasm. This isn’t a bug in any way shape or form … permanent databases on your phone, or PC, or whatever, don’t simply appear out of nowhere just by accident, and if that’s the claim then it’s one of the most ignorant things I’ve ever heard. It’s kind of like saying the odometer on your car was a mistake in manufacturing … oops! How did THAT get there?!

I’m a professional developer and I know what it takes to set up a SQLite database (which is what this is), there is absolutely no way that this is either a bug or an accident.

And the point isn’t that the phone is aware of your location (most phones these days are), it’s that your information is:

a) Being stored in an unencrypted and easy to access way without your consent or knowledge, contrary to even Apple’s own policy. Yes, I read it, and what Apple is claiming is NOT what they’re doing. And that’s ILLEGAL!

b) Despite repeated claims that you can turn off your location-based services, iGarbage keeps tracking you whether you have the services turned on or not. That’s worse than a wiretap for which you have to get a court order, and IT’S ILLEGAL!

c) The information is being kept indefinitely (at least since the last version of iOS came out), there is no stated purpose for keeping it, and there is no information on how it will be used or who it’ll be shared with. Most countries’ privacy laws state that this is ILLEGAL!

d) Apple claims it’s not doing any of this (kind of like claiming you’re doing anything wrong as you’re putting stolen merchandise into your pockets at a store), and supporters keep trying to placate the public with ludicrous articles like this, despite the fact that in one sentence we read things like “they’re not tracking anyone”, and the next, “but the phone needs to know where you are” (i.e. it’s tracking you) — it can’t be tracking you AND not tracking you at the same time. The only place things like this make sense are in the world of Apple.

e) Jobs is once again deflecting well-warranted criticism by making these ridiculous claims, and even going beyond by claiming that everyone ELSE does this EXCEPT Apple. Just like when Apple put out the last iPhone and said that ALL other phone lose connectivity when held in the wrong way (there is no other word for that than “lies”). Or that Flash (and later Java) are battery drains and don’t run on well mobile devices. Really? Okay, let’s see the test results (good luck finding anything even resembling facts). I’ve only ever seen one such test, performed by Apple zombies, and it’s so laughably skewed as to be pointless; the results were: the iPhone battery doesn’t last as long when Flash is running as when nothing is. Brilliant.

But, hey, go ahead and keep overpaying Jobs for your digital shackles if that’s your choice. I prefer informed consent, freedom of information, actual open source, and something better than willful, infantile, simplistic, and contradictory ignorance.

To sum up: Apple IS tracking you (as demonstrated by more than one independent researcher), now they’re lying about it (yes, Jobsie, the iPhone is an Apple product that you control with an iron grip and, hence, Apple and its products ARE tracking people), and instead of doing something to fix it or even just try to explain themselves, they’re pointing the finger at everyone around them: the standard Apple M.O.