Apple has denied collecting personal information on the location of iPhone users and said it will change the way some location data is stored on the phone to address security concerns. In response to the recent allegations that the iPhone stores unsecured user location data and sends back the info to Apple, the company issued a Q&A on its policies. Apple said it is not tracking the location of iPhones, "has never done so and has no plans to ever do so". Rather, the iPhone is maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around the user's location, in order to help the phone calculate its location when requested. According to Apple, this helps reduce the time taken compared to using just GPS satellite data from a few minutes to a few seconds. 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. The company said the crowd-sourced database is too big to store on an iPhone, so it downloads an appropriate subset (cache) onto each iPhone. This cache is protected but not encrypted, and is backed up in iTunes whenever the user backs up the 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 according to Apple can be more than 100 miles away from the iPhone. Apple said it plans to cease backing up this cache in a software update coming soon. Amid claims up to a year of location data may be on the phone, Apple said this is the result of a "bug we uncovered and plan to fix shortly", to reduce the data stored to just the past week. The problem of iPhones continuing to update the Wi-Fi and cell tower data even if Location Services are switched off will also be addressed in the software update. Apple also admitted that it's using the anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users "an improved traffic service in the next couple of years". However the location data is not shared with any third parties, unless the user has opted in either through an ad or as part of helping developers debug apps. The software update is expected "sometime in the next few weeks" Apple said. It will reduce the size of the crowd-sourced database cached on the iPhone, cease backing up this cache, and delete the cache entirely when Location Services is turned off. In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone.
