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.
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This entry was posted on July 15, 2014 at 8:55 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple, China, Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Apple Responds To Chinese Over Location Tracking
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.
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This entry was posted on July 15, 2014 at 8:55 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple, China, Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.