Apple has issued a press release with their response to “LocationGate”. At the time that this whole matter came to light, I performed an analysis in which I concluded that this was much ado about nothing, and after reading Apple’s statement, I am even more convinced. Here’s why.
The first statement of substance in the press release reveals:
“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.”
This makes complete sense to me. Anyone who has used a normal, handheld GPS can attest to the fact that when it is first turned on after either a long time turned off or after being transported a significant distance that it can take several minutes to determine which GPS satellites are overhead in your current location and get enough data from at least 3 of them to determine your position. That delay, on an iPhone, could impact the availability of location data significantly. Imagine landing after a cross-country flight, firing up your phone, and being unable to view the local weather, look for nearby restaurants, or anything else location-sensitive for several minutes. iPhone owners would be quite upset about this, and with good reason. Using the crowdsourced locations of cell towers and WiFi hotspots is a simple way to eliminate this delay. More importantly, it confirms what I suspected – that these locations aren’t actually YOUR location at all – as evidenced by the fact that my own device’s logs never show me in several places that I’ve been for lengthy periods of time, and do show me in places that I have NOT been – often at great distances. Apple reiterates this with a more definitive statement: “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 cell towers surrounding the iPhone’s location, which can be more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone.”
Apple also addresses whether or not they are determining the user’s location from this non-location data, and Apple responds in the negative – which makes sense, since (as I pointed out in my earlier article) the data is so vague as to render it useless from a tracking perspective.
So, in summary, all of the technical points that Apple makes match perfectly with what I observed.
Apple also states that the length of time that this data is cached and the fact that it persists when Location Services is turned off are both bugs that will be addressed in a future release. Fair enough. But, just to keep the tinfoil-wearing crowd happier, the file will no longer be backed up (which is fine, since the data can always be re-created on the phone as needed) and it will be encrypted on the phone (which may or may not concern you since we do not know in what manner it will be encrypted).
Now, hopefully, all of the sensationalist pieces on this non-issue will go away and the “Locationers” can join the “Birthers” in conceding that there really is nothing to be paranoid about.
Update: Looks like MG Siegler over at Techcrunch agrees with me.
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