Apple responds regarding iPhone Big Brother tracking evilness
Apple has issued a Q&A on location data. Looks like Alex Levinson was largely right, and that Marco Arment (who I concurred with), who said the data retention was a bug, was also right.
The major take-homes, if you don’t want to read through Apple’s piece:
- Apple’s not tracking you, you paranoid crazy person.
- Apple’s in fact ‘crowdsourcing’ a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers, to make your iOS devices more rapidly and accurately calculate their locations when they need to.
- The data doesn’t include your actual location itself, but may include locations up to 100 miles from your device. (This may be a minor problem if your property is, say, a small country, but otherwise you can stop panicking now.)
- A software update due in a few weeks will reduce the cache from a year’s worth of data to a week’s worth, delete the cache entirely if you turn off location services, and cease to back-up the cache.
Compared to the Sony PSN disaster (where even credit card details “may” have been stolen), the Apple story’s looking rather damp-squibbish now. What will be interesting is to see how Apple’s rivals in the smartphone space respond, seeing as some of them also track and retain location and other data.
That seems like an appropriate resolution.
Good on them for issuing such a comprehensive response. 🙂
So as I see, people have no problem tweeting with geo location turned on, checking in places through Facebook and Foursquare and the list goes on. But they seriously have issues on caching locations on their phone. Either people are bored (more likely) or the media just needed something to whine on (sponsored by Blodget and Android freaks).
Commenting very much off the cuff from my first reading of the location logging discovery, surely
“The data doesn’t include your actual location itself, but may include locations up to 100 miles from your device”
is absolutely not the case both factually and figuratively?
Not to mention that Google copped a shitstorm for collecting hotspots info. I guess they didn’t think of the “crowdsourcing” angle.
It’s locations of cell towers/Wi-Fi zones, not “he’s here at this address” and may include locations up to 100 miles from your device. That explains why the map I downloaded from my device didn’t include my street in its locations, but happily suggested my iPhone had visited towns I didn’t even know existed.
Hmm so location info that can’t be used to triangulate the phone’s position?
Are you saying that the file doesn’t contain all the info needed to track the phone’s location as it moves around? That would exactly counter the gist of a few articles I’ve read (admittedly newspaper articles so perhaps not that shocking if inaccurate).
@rog: The file gives you someone’s approximate location, but not “phone owner lives at number 15 Cornflake Avenue, London”, and Apple ends up with less information than that (i.e. what’s sent isn’t tied to a device). Ian Betteridge has a good overview of what’s what, also reacting to PC Pro’s off-the-mark response to Apple.