Don't follow me ... Apple says that it does not track the location of a user's iPhone and 'has never done so'. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the GuardianApple has admitted that a bug in its software has allowed iPhones and iPads to collect data related to their location even when users turn off permission to collect it – but says it will soon remedy this oversight.
The admission follows a storm of controversy after the Guardian's exclusive revelation last week that the devices stored a file containing details from which a user's movements could be reconstructed.
In a statement on its website, the company says that: "Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans ever to do so."
It says that the file discovered by researchers and described in the Guardian is not used for tracking of the phone or its owner. "The location data that researchers are seeing on the iPhone is not the past or present location of the iPhone, but rather the locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and [mobile network] cell towers surrounding the iPhone's location, which can be more than 100 miles away from the iPhone." It adds: "We plan to cease backing up this cache in a software update coming soon."
That will cut the amount of data stored from as much as a year's worth of location information to just seven days, the company says. That is likely to be roughly comparable with the store used on Android phones, which record the past 50 cell towers and 200 Wi-Fi networks that the phone has "seen".
That data is uploaded to Apple in an "encrypted and anonymous" form, it says.
It admits that a software fault means that if users turn off Location Services – which should prevent the upload – the data is still sent. "It shouldn't. This is a bug, which we plan to fix shortly," the company says.
Future versions of the file will be encrypted on the phone. That will allay fears that law enforcement and security services could copy the file and analyse it without a valid warrant.
Apple accepts some of the blame for the concern over the revelations, which have seen it threatened with lawsuits and put under focus from US lawmakers and potentially by European governments. "Providing mobile users with fast and accurate location information while preserving their security and privacy has raised some very complex technical issues which are hard to communicate in a soundbite. Users are confused, partly because the creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date," the company says in its statement.
The data is stored because it helps the iPhone to calculate its location, Apple says. "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 insists that it cannot identify individuals from the data because the data about networks and Wi-Fi – which is reported to the company's servers – is anonymised and encrypted.
The Guardian approached Apple ahead of publication last week of its article detailing the findings by the researchers, but the company declined to comment at the time. Repeated requests for comment received no response until now.
Since then Apple has found itself under fire, with the US Democratic senator Al Franken writing directly to Apple chief executive Steve Jobs demanding to know why the phones retained the data, and attempts to file a class action lawsuit against the company.
Jobs himself was curtly emphatic in an email earlier this week in which he insisted "we don't track anyone" and that "the info circulating around is false".
Apple has just announced the availability of the white iPhone. Unlike the black iPhone, it is able to reflect all colors of the visible spectrum, thereby making it white. It will be available tomorrow at Apple retail stores, AT&T, and Verizon wireless. It will also be available in the following countries on Thursday, April 28:
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