Jobs Gave an Interview to Clarify iPhone Location Tracking Issue

Ina Fried of The Wall Street Journal yesterday published a telephone interview with Apple's executives Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall. CEO of the company again explained Apple's further policy related to recently found algorithm of collecting anonymous data about iPhones' locations.

"If people don’t want to participate in things, they will be able to turn location services off. Once we get a bug that we found fixed, their phone will not be collecting or contributing any crowdsourced information. But nor will it be calculating location."

He also added that Apple protects users' privacy:

"Number one is we get consent from users if we are going to use location, or we never use location. That’s what we do. It’s very straightforward".

He also shed some light on the fact that the file with locations found on the iPhone was unencrypted:

"We had that protected on the system. It had root protection and was sandboxed from any other application. But if someone hacks their phone and jailbreaks it, they can get to this and misunderstand the point of that."

Phil Schiller noted that people should not care about these things.

"I would think an analogy of a crowdsourced database is every time you walk into a retail store, many retailers have a clicker that counts how many people come in and out of the store. Nobody really cares about that because it is completely anonymous. It is not personal data. It is not anything to worry about. It’s not something that people feel is private because it is really not about them. It’s a coagulated total of all traffic. These crowdsourced databases are sort of like that. Things like that aren’t so scary when you think about them in everyday terms".

This is a good analogy as Apple and many other retailers actually collect data about how people explore the stores in order to optimize the product positioning, for instance.

Ina also asked Jobs to explain the idea, mentioned in the company’s official statement, about gathering traffic data and creating a crowdsource database, but Steve didn't tell anything new:

"We mentioned the traffic service and I think that is all we are going to mention at this point in time before we have something to announce."

As US Congress became also interested in the issue, Jobs told that Apple will be testifying.

"I think it is great that they are investigating this and I think it will be interesting to see how aggressive or lazy the press is on this in terms of investigating the rest of the participants in the industry and finding out what they do."

Apple executives also explained it took a week to respond on the issue because they needed a time “to figure this all out”, write it up and make it intelligible for the masses.

AppleInsider notes that this time Apple needed less than a week to react, but last summer, when Gizmodo and other found iPhone loses signal when being gripped in a certain way, Apple responded only in a month by conducting a special event for journalists. It is obvious Apple learns to faster react on such situations in order to prevent possible negative consequences.