Apple denies iPhone tracking, will update

Associated Press

NEW YORK

Apple denied that the iPhone has a privacy problem Wednesday — and then promised to fix it. It took the technology giant a week to respond to a brouhaha over how the devices log their owners’ movements.

Privacy concerns erupted last week when security researchers said a file found on PCs linked to iPhones allowed them to create maps of the phones’ movements for up to a year.

Combined with similar questions about Google’s Android smartphone software, the news left privacy-conscious smartphone users wondering how much information they were unknowingly giving up.

Apple denied claims that it was keeping tabs on its customers, saying the file records Wi-Fi hot spots and cell towers in the general area of iPhones, not the whereabouts of their users.

The company implied that the privacy concerns raised by that file were partly based on a misunderstanding.

But it also said that a software error was the reason the files are storing up to a year’s worth of information, and that it would fix that issue and others in a few weeks.

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

It had revealed the nature of the location file in a letter to Congress last summer after an earlier round of questions about its location-tracking practices.

The data help the phone figure out its location, Apple said. They allow the phone to listen for signals from hot spots and cell towers, which are much stronger than signals from GPS satellites. Wi-Fi signals don’t reach very far, which means that if a phone picks up a signal it recognizes, it can deduce that it’s close to that hot spot.

Taken together, this means navigation applications can present the phone’s location faster and more accurately than if the phone relied on GPS alone, Apple said.

In its 10-point question-and-answer statement, Apple didn’t address why the files contain “timestamps” that link a phone to certain hot spots and cell towers at a certain time. Those timestamps are what allowed researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden to construct animated maps of a phone’s movements over a year.