Hoping to put to rest a growing controversy over privacy, Steven Jobs, Apple?s chief executive, took the unusual step of personally explaining that while Apple had made mistakes in how it handled location data on its mobile devices, it had not used the iPhone and iPad to keep tabs on the whereabouts of its customers.
?We haven?t been tracking anybody,? Jobs had said. ?Never have. Never will.?
Jobs said Apple would fix the mistakes in a free software update that it would release in the next few weeks.
Jobs, who is currently on medical leave, addressed the issue along with two Apple executives ? Philip W. Schiller, the senior vice-president of worldwide product marketing, and Scott Forstall, the senior vice-president of iPhone software. A week ago, two researchers reported that they had discovered a file in Apple?s devices containing what appeared to be data of the locations visited by users over the previous 12 months. The discovery raised fears that Apple was tracking its users and prompted investigations by various European governments and demands for explanations from United States lawmakers.
Earlier on Wednesday, Apple posted a statement on its website explaining how its system used the file to pinpoint a phone?s location.
Jobs defended the timing of Apple?s response to the controversy, saying that ?rather than run to the PR department,? it set out to determine exactly what happened. ?The first thing we always do when a problem is brought to us is we try to isolate it and find out if it is real,? he said. ?It took us about a week to do an investigation and write a response, which is fairly quick for something this technically complicated.?
He added, ?Scott and Phil and myself were all involved in writing the response because we think it is that important.?
Some privacy advocates who were harshly critical of Apple last week praised the company?s response, saying it was a step in the right direction.
?Apple acknowledged a mistake and they fixed it,? Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre, said in an interview. ?That?s a good thing.?
Confirming speculation from some security researchers, Apple said in the statement posted on its website that the file in people?s iPhones was not a log of their locations but rather ?the locations of Wi-Fi hot spots and cell towers surrounding the iPhone?s location, which can be more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone.?
Apple said it used the data, which it called a cache, to calculate a device?s location more quickly than through GPS satellites.
But Apple acknowledged that it had made mistakes, which it attributed to programming errors, in storing the data for a long time, keeping the file unencrypted and storing the data even when users had chosen to turn off location services. ?The system is incredibly complex,? Forstall said. ?We test this carefully but in such a complex system there are sometimes places where we could do better.? Apple said it would reduce the location cache on the iPhone to no more than seven days. The company also said it would stop backing up the cache onto people?s computers and would delete the cache entirely when users turned off location services. Apple also said that it updated its database of Wi-Fi hot spots and cell towers by using its customers? phones as sensors.