Apple has finally released a statement regarding the location data controversy which erupted last week. The statement answers 10 questions that should help iPhone users understand exactly what is going with their location data.
The main take-away here is that Apple is not actually tracking your location. They aren’t even storing your location. The location data that people are seeing is from 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.”
In an upcoming software update, Apple will address a bug which continues to update this database when Location Services is turned off. Other fixes include: Reducing the size of the crowd-sourced database, no longer backing up this cache, and deleting the cache entirely when you turn off Location Services.
To reiterate, the information in the database is not necessarily yours, it’s simply a cache of towers and WiFi hotspots that Apple has collected anonymously in order to speed up the process of finding a GPS satellite when you do choose to use Location Services.
Check out the full statement here.
via Ars