Apple: We don’t track your iPhone

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Apple today claimed it doesn’t track user locations through the iPhone, but has still offered a software update to reassure customers of its intentions.

The company has been under scrutiny since last week when researchers revealed the iPhone was capable of storing a user’s location within the device.

The files were said to record the latitude and longitude of the device, along with a timestamp, enabling such information to be exploited.

After days of silence from Apple, the company finally released a “Q&A on location data” via its website in an attempt to allay users' fears and explain what was going on.

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

Companies such as Apple have not fully explained the technical issues surrounding “accurate location information” on handsets that protect users' privacy, the iPhone maker claimed, suggesting this was a reason behind many fears.

Apple admitted to keeping a database with information about Wi-Fi hotspots and cellular towers located near devices. But it claimed the intention here was to keep location-based services up-to-date, whilst also storing the information anonymously and in an encrypted form.

“Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes,” the statement read.

“iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements).”

However, subsets of this data are stored on iPhones and this information is not encrypted, even when backed-up onto iTunes – unless the user has chosen this preference.

This “subset” or “cache” of data has remained on handsets for up to a year. Apple now plans to release a software update to remedy this. Following the furore, the company has decided it does not need more than seven days of data stored on an iPhone.

Those who turned off location services were also subject to this process, however. Apple has put this down to a bug which it also plans to fix in the soon-to-arrive iOS update.

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

Apple will continue to collect “anonymous traffic data” though. It claims this will help the company work out traffic hotspots to provide for in the near future, as well as allowing third parties to see anonymous crash logs and decide where to target their advertising.

Both Google and Microsoft have also been accused of tracking user data.

Read our analysis of the saga to see why you should care about handset tracking.

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