Auf der Apple Webseite wurde eine Seite aufgeschaltet, um die Fragen bezüglich Geo Location Tracking zu klären.

Wie man sieht, ist es Apple wichtig, dass die User informiert sind und erklärt, warum Apple die Geo Location Daten speichert.

Hier ist ein kleiner Auszug von der Webseite:

1. Why is Apple tracking the location of my iPhone?

Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.

2. Then why is everyone so concerned about this?

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.

3. Why is my iPhone logging my location?

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.

4. Is this crowd-sourced database stored on the iPhone?

The entire crowd-sourced database is too big to store on an iPhone, so we download an appropriate subset (cache) onto each iPhone. This cache is protected but not encrypted, and is backed up in iTunes whenever you back up your iPhone. The backup is encrypted or not, depending on the user settings in iTunes. 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. We plan to cease backing up this cache in a software update coming soon (see Software Update section below).

5. Can Apple locate me based on my geo-tagged Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?

No. This data is sent to Apple in an anonymous and encrypted form. Apple cannot identify the source of this data.

Weitere Fragen und Antworten zu den Geo Location Tracking Vorwürfen findet ihr unter folgendem Link:

• Fragen und Antworten zu dem Geo Location Tracking (Apple)

Wie Apple weiter bekannt geben hat, kommt in den kommenden Wochen ein kostenloses iOS Update, welches die folgenden Probleme beheben soll:

• Kleiner Datenbank mit Wi-Fi Hotspot und Cell Tower Daten wird auf dem iPhone gecached
• Geo Tracking Daten werden nicht mehr gebackupt
• Cache wird gelöscht, wenn der Location Service ausgeschaltet ist

Im nächst grösseren iOS Update wird auch der Cache auf dem iPhone verschlüsselt sein.

Wir halten euch auf dem Laufenden, sobald wir mehr wissen.

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