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Congressman urges FTC probe of iPhone location tracking

April 28, 2011 — 10:28am ET | By Jason Ankeny

Despite Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) assurances that it is not tracking the location of users' iOS devices and has no plans to do so, Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) isn't satisfied with Apple's explanation and is calling on the Federal Trade Commission to launch a probe into the computing giant's privacy practices. CNet reports Inslee feels a federal investigation is necessary to "ensure all the questions regarding this issue, including the lack of disclosure, are answered." Inslee--who in 2004 introduced the unsuccessful E-Mail Privacy Act--added that the iPhone location controversy is an example of why lawmakers must introduce rules and regulations governing companies' data collection and use practices.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who serves as vice chairman of a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee and signed a letter to Apple CEO Steve Jobs earlier this week asking for answers about Apple's iOS software and privacy policies, hinted that a House of Representatives hearing is already in the works. "(Rep.) Blackburn finds Apple's response encouraging but is eager to hear from companies and their engineers directly," a spokesman told CNet. "This is further evidence that interaction between consumers and providers in the free marketplace is the best way to protect privacy, property, and innovation." In addition, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) has requested that both Apple and rival Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) appear at a Senate hearing scheduled for May 10--Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan is also requesting face time.

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 broke its silence on the matter Wednesday, explaining that iOS devices are in fact 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.

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.

"We haven't been tracking anybody's location and 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 told All Things Digital. "As new technology comes into the society there is a period of adjustment and education. We haven't, as an industry, done a very good job educating people, I think, as to some of the more subtle things going on here. As such, (people) jumped to a lot of wrong conclusions in the last week. I think the right time to educate people is when there is no problem. I think we will probably ask ourselves how we can do some of that, as an industry."

For more:
-read this CNet article
-read this All Things Digital article