∞ Steve Jobs discusses iPhone location data

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Apple CEO Steve Jobs is speaking publicly about how his company doesn’t use location data.

[ad#Google Adsense 300x250 in story]“We haven’t been tracking anyone,” Jobs said in a telephone interview with Mobilized on Wednesday. “The files they found on these phones, as we explained, it turned out were basically files we have built through anonymous, crowdsourced information that we collect from the tens of millions of iPhones out there.”

Jobs declined to comment on how other companies like Google may use the information.

Apple issued a Q&A earlier today answering many of the questions users, lawyers and government officials have with the collection of data. In the Q&A, Apple made its stance very clear.

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


  • http://www.facebook.com/superrob Rob Stevens

    Jobs: “”We haven’t been tracking anyone … The files they found on these phones … we have built through anonymous, crowdsourced information that we collect from the tens of millions of iPhones out there.”

    Wait … so they haven’t been tracking anyone, they’ve been tracking EVERYONE with an iPhone? What an odd admission to make. Yes, it’s anonymized, but the wording there is odd. It’s like saying, “We’re not tracking YOU. We’re making a record of every location that you’re at. Ever.”

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

    Except that they just said that not only are they doing that, they’re using it to build a database of locations, a subset of which they put on EVERY iPhone. That’s way more concerning than Apple saying, “Hey, there’s a log of everywhere you’ve been, but it’s there so that you can use location services faster.”

    Bear in mind, I’m not the least bit concerned about this. I’m a happy iPhone user, and I’m not expecting much privacy in this day and age. I just find it amusing the little tap dance Apple is doing here.

    • Anonymous

      Quit being stupid here. There’s a big difference between getting locations anonymously and getting locations of John Doe’s phone at a given instant in time. Big difference. Intelligence is the ability to discern differences. So if you have any, you can get this.

      It’s like AT&T getting data on cell phone usage so they can plan where to put up cell towers. They don’t care WHO makes calls. They just track calls in general. Get the difference? Huh?

      Hope so.

  • Jim

    “Hey, there’s a log of everywhere you’ve been, but it’s there so that you can use location services faster.”

    But it isn’t a log of everywhere you have been, it is a log of all the towers and wi-fi spots that were in your general location.

  • http://twitter.com/ankleskater Ankle Skater

    The funniest thing about this, in retrospect, is that the initial sleuths who “discovered” LocationGate kept blogging about the inaccuracy of the iPhone’s tracking. One even wrote that his home never showed up as one of the locations stored. Haven’t seen any updates from these Sherlocks yet.