Location Tracking in iPad and iPhone: Just a Bug According to Apple
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An article published by the Guardian about the fact that both iPad 3G and iPhone keep track of their user’s whereabouts sparked an outcry amongst iOS users. After the issue went all the way to Washington, with a slew of senators and Congressmen demanding answers from Apple, and after civil lawsuits started to pour in, the Cupertino-based company finally came out of its silence, via a press release published earlier today.
While the location tracking file was discovered some time ago, it didn’t get much coverage until the Guardian published a piece about it last week. For some unknown reason, GPS-enabled iOS devices such as 3G iPad 1/2 and iPhone save the location of their owner on a regular basis, in a file stored on the device, and saved by iTunes each time the device is plugged into a Mac or a PC.
In Apple’s own words, “Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone [and iPad 3G]. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.” The press release explains that the location feature introduced in iOS 4 is nothing more than a way for iOS devices to calculate their location faster.
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.
Data extracted from an iPhone location file – Credit: Guardian
When asked about why the files was designed to hold up to a year’s worth of location data, Apple simply explains that a bug prevents iPhone and iPad 3G to purge the file – technically, Apple never planned to record more than seven days’ worth of location data.
This data is not the iPhone’s location data—it is 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 (see Software Update section below). We don’t think the iPhone needs to store more than seven days of this data.
Sometime in the next few weeks, Apple will release an update to iOS to clear the issue. The update will:
- reduce the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone and iPad
- cease backing up this cache
- delete this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off
- encrypt the location cache on the iPhone.
In other words — much ado about nothing!
