Last week you’ll recall that I wrote about Chinese State Media claiming that Apple’s location tracking was a “national security concern.” I also said that because of Apple’s desire to be a player in the Chinese market, they’d have to respond. Well, they have on their Chinese website in both Chinese and English. Here’s a portion of what the statement said:
Our customers want and expect their mobile devices to be able to quickly and reliably determine their current locations for specific activities such as shopping, travel, finding the nearest restaurant or calculating the amount of time it takes them to get to work. We do this at the device level. Apple does not track users’ locations – Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.
And:
Frequent Locations are only stored on a customer’s iOS device, they are not backed up on iTunes or iCloud, and are encrypted. Apple does not obtain or know a user’s Frequent Locations and this feature can always be turned “Off” via our privacy settings.
Apple does not have access to Frequent Locations or the location cache on any user’s iPhone at any time. We encrypt the cache by the user’s passcode and it is protected from access by any app.
They conclude by saying this:
As we have stated before, Apple has never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will. It’s something we feel very strongly about.
Now, that’s a very definitive statement. One wonders why they didn’t come out with something similar last year when iOS 7 first appeared and people (including yours truly) first found this feature. Perhaps if they did, we wouldn’t be talking about it now.
US Government Claims That Data On Servers Anywhere Belongs To Them
Posted in Commentary with tags Lawsuit, Privacy, USA on July 15, 2014 by itnerdIf there was something that could be defined as over-reaching, perhaps this is it. Here’s a story from ARS Technica that I just tripped over that has the U.S. Justice Department’s claiming that companies served with valid warrants for data must produce that data even if the data is not stored in the U.S.:
Global governments, the tech sector, and scholars are closely following a legal flap in which the US Justice Department claims that Microsoft must hand over e-mail stored in Dublin, Ireland. In essence, President Barack Obama’s administration claims that any company with operations in the United States must comply with valid warrants for data, even if the content is stored overseas. It’s a position Microsoft and companies like Apple say is wrong, arguing that the enforcement of US law stops at the border. A magistrate judge has already sided with the government’s position, ruling in April that “the basic principle that an entity lawfully obligated to produce information must do so regardless of the location of that information.” Microsoft appealed to a federal judge, and the case is set to be heard on July 31.
Well, isn’t that delightful. I was always under the impression that you cannot serve warrants to search property in other countries. But I’m a computer nerd, not a lawyer. But I’m thinking that if this does hold up somehow, and Microsoft releases the data stored in another country, then how long will it take for every other country in the world to buy equipment or services from a non-American or solely domestic company simply to avoid something like this happening to them? For example Germans buy from German companies or the French buying from French companies. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This is a case that needs to be watched closely as it’s going to have a huge impact.
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