Steve Jobs comments on location data
Following up on Apple's location data Q&A, posted earlier today, Mobilizer spoke with CEO Steve Jobs and other members of the executive team.
“We haven’t been tracking anyone,” Jobs said in a telephone interview with Mobilized on Wednesday. “The files they found on these phones, as we explained, it turned out were basically files we have built through anonymous, crowdsourced information that we collect from the tens of millions of iPhones out there.”
As to why Apple seems to get singled out in media and investigations, Jobs said he'll be looking to see coverage of their competitors.
“Some of them don’t do what we do,” Jobs said. “That’s for sure.”
UPDATE: The full transcript of the interview with Steve Jobs, Scott Forstall, and Phil Schiller is now online. The explanation of why it took so long is similar to the one given during the iPhone 4 antenna press conference. [Mobilizer]
We’re an engineering-driven company. When people accuse us of things, the first thing we want to do is find out the truth. That took a certain amount of time to track all of these things down. And the accusations were coming day by day. By the time we had figured this all out, it took a few days. Then writing it up and trying to make it intelligible when this is a very high-tech topic took a few days. And here we are less than a week later.
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Were they tracking him during his telephone interview ?
Jobs probably traced the people to see if they were tracking him lol
Translation: "Some of them do a lot more tracking than we do."
So Steve Jobs, let me get this straight....
“We haven’t been tracking anyone,”
Followed by:
"as we explained, it turned out were basically files we have built through anonymous, crowdsourced information that we collect from the tens of millions of iPhones out there.”
So you are tracking people.....Contradicting statements, no?
Doesn't matter.
No. Read the press release in detail. They are not tracking where phones are, they are compiling a huge database of WiFi hotspots and cell towers, which make it easier to zero in on a location of the phone when requested by the phone (and therefore by you, since you opted in). The location data is anonymous.
a·non·y·mous
[uh-non-uh-muhs]
- adjective 1. of unknown or undisclosed origin
- Related Forms a·non·y·mous·ly- adverb non·a·non·y·mous·ness- noun
Steve and Apple will ultimately do the right thing. It's the competitors that I wonder about which is a big part of my decision to switch from Blackberry to Apple instead of Android. Open platforms can be great, but without even the smallest amounts of regulations or controls, the wrong people can do a lot of harm to consumers without the developers' knowledge.
Of course, it would have be something if they'd done the right thing from the start! ...before getting exposed! But they are great st PR! You're clearly drinking the Apple juice! LOL! Just kidding -- I've just been waiting to use that one.
Apple makes great stuff. I was an iPhone user until recently when I made a researched, strategic switch to Android, which I love even more than I did my iPhone.
Perfect. That's all I wanted...a means to know what was going on and Apple's acknowledgement that this was an issue. I appreciate the honesty. Now if Apple can just work on getting in front of the story, rather than scrambling after the fact, they'll kick butt in the PR department. If only they were this upfront at the beginning of Antennagate!
This is why we couldn't stay under 200mb on our data plan with the iphone 4 and had to go to 2gb, never had a problem on 3g with data approaching 200mb, also explains the data surges people started reporting and have continued to report with the iphone 4.
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