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Apple: We're not tracking the location of your iPhone

April 27, 2011 — 10:10am ET | By Jason Ankeny

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has finally broken its silence over reports that devices running its iOS mobile operating system store user location data in a hidden file, stating "Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so." According to Apple, iOS devices are instead gathering location information to maintain a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in the user's vicinity, enabling an iPhone to more rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested--Apple adds that calculating a phone's whereabouts via only GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes, while its approach can slash the process to a few seconds.

"These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple," the company explains. "The entire crowd-sourced database is too big to store on an iPhone, so we download an appropriate subset (cache) onto each iPhone. This cache is protected but not encrypted, and is backed up in iTunes whenever you back up your iPhone. The backup is encrypted or not, depending on the user settings in iTunes."

Speaking last week at the Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco, British researchers Alisdair Allan and Pete Warden reported that iPhone and iPod devices have recorded location and time-stamp data since the mid-2010 release of the iOS 4 software update, effectively creating a comprehensive log of all user movement and activities during that time. Apple's response: "The location data that researchers are seeing on the iPhone is not the past or present location of the iPhone, but rather the locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers surrounding the iPhone's location, which can be more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone. We plan to cease backing up this cache in a software update coming soon."

Apple goes on to state that all location data is transmitted in an anonymous and encrypted format, and that it cannot identify the source of this data. Apple blames a software bug for cases where iPhones have stored as much as a year of location data, vowing to resolve the issue shortly with the release of a free iOS software update that reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone, ceases backing up this cache, and deletes this cache entirely when the Location Services function is turned off. The cache also will be encrypted on the iPhone in conjunction with the next major iOS software release.

"Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users an improved traffic service in the next couple of years," the company states, adding that it also provides anonymous crash logs from opt-in users to third-party developers to help them debug their apps. "Our iAds advertising system can use location as a factor in targeting ads," Apple continues. "Location is not shared with any third party or ad unless the user explicitly approves giving the current location to the current ad (for example, to request the ad locate the Target store nearest them)."

The iPhone location data fracas is the subject of a class action suit accusing Apple of invasion of privacy and computer fraud. The suit, filed Apr. 22 on behalf of iOS users Vikram Ajjampur and William Devito in federal court in Tampa, Fla., contends that Apple is secretly recording the movements of iPhone and iPad users and seeks a judge's order barring the practice. "We take issue specifically with the notion that Apple is now basically tracking people everywhere they go," Aaron Mayer, an attorney for the plaintiffs, told Bloomberg. "If you are a federal marshal, you have to have a warrant to do this kind of thing, and Apple is doing it without one."

Ajjampur and Devito are also requesting refunds for their iOS product purchases, contending they would have steered clear of Apple devices had they known about the potential for location data tracking. The lawsuit seeks unspecified punitive damages for alleged negligent misrepresentation. Anywhere from one-third to one-half of the U.S.'s 60 million iPhone users could be part of the class, Mayer added.

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