After triggering privacy concerns across the word over a hidden iPhone feature that was discovered that tracks user data, Apple has finally responded to the queries through an “Apple Q&A on Location Data”.
Apple admits that users are confused, partly because the creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date.
Answering a question, ‘Why does my iPhone need so much data in order to assist it in finding my location today?’, Apple says that this data is not the iPhone’s location data but a subset (cache) of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database which is downloaded from Apple into the iPhone to assist the iPhone in rapidly and accurately calculating location. The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a ‘bug’ we uncovered and plan to fix shortly. Apple says that it doesn’t think the iPhone needs to store more than seven days of this data.
But why does Apple store this data at all? According to the iPhone vendor, the iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). 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.
Apple also says that when you turn off Location Services, your iPhone might still continue updating its Wi-Fi and cell tower data from Apple’s crowd-sourced database as this a part of the bug in the software, which the company plans to fix shortly.
Apple also admits that its iAds advertising system can use location as a factor in targeting ads. However, it insists that 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).
Without giving a specific date for the fix to this bug, Apple says it’ll release 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 Location Services is turned off.
In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone.
Infosec India 