The iPhone tracking issue has been making rounds for a couple of weeks now. For those who don’t know, iPhone stores the timestamp, latitude and longitude of your location in a secret file in the User Partition area and this file is copied to your computer whenever you sync your iPhone and your computer. It was unclear whether Apple was collecting this data intentionally. Apps were made available in the cydia app store to stop this tracking issue by clearing the hidden file and those who have jailbroken iPhones were able to download the app.

Now, official statement has been released by Apple on the issue. The statement is like a FAQ with questions that everyone wanted answers for. It is clearly specified that Apple doesn’t track any user. The statement tells us that Apple has never tracked the users and it will never do so. Apple has stated that use of location information is crucial in modern day smart phones. However, the company has agreed that not enough education is provided by the manufacturers including Apple on this issue and this lack of awareness is the root cause for all the confusion.

The hidden file is more like a database with location information and Apple has mentioned that iPhone is not logging location. The database file is meant to store information about Wi-Fi hotspots and cell phone towers close to your location so that location services can be provided in a better way. Using GPS satellite to find location information is time consuming and a database within an iPhone will cut down this time. Only a subset of the crowd sourced database is stored in iPhone and Apple will not be able to identify where the information came from.

Apple said that a minor software update will be released and it will reduce the size of cache where the location information is stored. It is also expected that some encryption will be applied to the locally stored data to prevent unwanted access.

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