Apple has remained mostly silent on its latest “Locationgate” scandal involving GPS-equipped iOS devices recording and saving location data -- until now. The company has just posted an extensive question and answer document on its website, covering 10 key points.
Apple has just released a “Q&A on Location Data” document to their website, which extensively covers 10 key points about the company’s latest PR drama which some have called “Locationgate.”
“Apple would like to respond to the questions we have recently received about the gathering and use of location information by our devices,” the document begins.
In the first handful of answers, the company explains that Apple is not tracking your device. “Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so,” answer number one reveals. In fact, the company claims that your iPhone or 3G-equipped iPad is not logging your location at all, but rather “maintaining a database of Wi-Fi 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.”
In fact, the data being stored is actually a cache of the “crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database which is downloaded from Apple into the iPhone to assist the iPhone in rapidly and accurately calculating location.” So why does the data go back nearly a year, to the introduction of iOS 4, you may ask? It turns out that’s a software bug, which will soon be addressed with a free iOS software update.
The update, expected “sometime in the next few weeks,” aims to reduce the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone, cease backing up this cache and delete the cache entirely when Location Services are turned off. Furthermore, the “next major iOS software release” (presumably iOS 5) will actually encrypt the cache on the device itself.
The full 10-point Q&A document is worth a read for anyone concerned about privacy issues, and can be found on Apple’s PR website.
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