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Transcript of Interview With Apple Executives on iOS Location Tracking

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Phil Schiller, Steve Jobs, and Scott Forstall at iOS 4 introduction (Source: CNET)

Earlier today, All Things Digital conducted a telephone interview with Steve Jobs and other Apple senior executives, covering the location tracking controversy and white iPhone 4 delays. All Things Digital has now followed with a full, edited transcript of the portion of the interview covering the location tracking issue.

In the full interview, Jobs discusses why it took Apple nearly a week to respond to the issue, noting that the company needed to take the time to investigate the situation and figure out how best to relate the information to the public.
"We're an engineering-driven company," Jobs said in a telephone interview Wednesday. "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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Most of the other points of the interview were covered in the earlier highlight piece, but the full transcript also includes new details about how the location database works and about Apple's views on user control over location services.

When pressed on what services Apple might be developing using location information, Jobs referred only to the potential traffic service disclosed in the official Q&A, declining to expand on that with additional information or possibilities.
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2011/04/27/transcript-of-interview-with-apple-executives-on-ios-location-tracking/
Why does it take a media storm for Apple to open up on an issue ? It would be so much better if they more forthcoming and frank before an issue snowballs.
 
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if they are not tracking people then why have the feature? maybe the information is for someone else??... who knows but one thing is for sure its an invasion of privacy..... even if I do stay home all day and night.
 
Full of Win said:
Why does it take a media storm for Apple to open up on an issue ? It would be so much better if they more forthcoming and frank befoe an issue snowballs.
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As they said, it has been a week. It is not really there fault that the media instantly makes a storm out of every Apple issue.


webznz said:
if they are not tracking people then why have the feature? maybe the information is for someone else??... who knows but one thing is for sure its an invasion of privacy..... even if I do stay home all day and night.
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It is clear from your reply you did not read the transcript or any thing else on this issue...
 
Thoughts

Maybe the reason they didn't bring it up was because they are working on a new feature (ie new maps or turn by turn gps built into the next iOS; they did mention it was to collect data for something like that), but now that the media has blown it out of proportion, they had to come out and address it. At least, that's what I'm assuming Apple's point of view was.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-gb) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8H7 Safari/6533.18.5)

webznz said:
if they are not tracking people then why have the feature? maybe the information is for someone else??... who knows but one thing is for sure its an invasion of privacy..... even if I do stay home all day and night.
Click to expand...

How? That's like saying that Adium reads your chat transcripts because they are saved locally...
 
Nicely done Steve and Scott. I liked the last line Steve said.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-gb) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8H7 Safari/6533.18.5)

silentnite said:
Don't worry somebody's already working on an app to block the tracking. You can bet on that:D
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No, that already exists for cydia users...
 
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.
Click to expand...

As someone who has to track down things like this constantly, I'm pretty unimpressed at the (lack of) speed of their code checking. This was not an obscure bug or complicated. It was just a too-large buffer definition and an execution path that always downloaded info.

And people think Apple can check binary app store submissions for bugs or trojans in just a few minutes, when they can't even find their own bugs in a few days with commented source code.

Then writing it up and trying to make it intelligible when this is a very high-tech topic took a few days.
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Again unimpressed. There've been accurate explanations posted here before Apple spoke up, that took just minutes to compose.

And here we are less than a week later.
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Although I've defended Apple over and over again on this topic, this just smacks of hoping it would blow over.

The right thing to do would've been to immediately say a week ago, "we're looking into it".
 
nsshah85 said:
Maybe the reason they didn't bring it up was because they are working on a new feature (ie new maps or turn by turn gps built into the next iOS; they did mention it was to collect data for something like that), but now that the media has blown it out of proportion, they had to come out and address it. At least, that's what I'm assuming Apple's point of view was.
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Actually, I think the news caught them by surprise a bit as well. If you read the transcript, they mention the actual "bug" that caused it to keep such a long history: They only culled the DB based on file size and set the max size to 2MB.

Turns out that when your data is extremely simple, you can store years worth of data in 2MB. Without a second limit on the data (timeframe), it basically became a year-long history of what was queried from the central DB and cached. In some ways it was smart not to comment in any definitive way until the investigation was done. But it probably wasn't smart that they didn't at least say "Hey, something seems off here, we are looking into it and will report back in a week."
 
Full of Win said:
Why does it take a media storm for Apple to open up on an issue ? It would be so much better if they more forthcoming and frank before an issue snowballs.
Click to expand...

maybe because, often, it's not even an issue ... until the media makes it an issue.

P.
 
Full of Win said:
Why does it take a media storm for Apple to open up on an issue ? It would be so much better if they more forthcoming and frank before an issue snowballs.
Click to expand...

While its obvious you never say anything positive about Apple I have to ask you this, did you even read the article? Did you read the part where they talked about tracking down the issue and making a report to release to the public? You do realize this stuff takes time right and isn't something that can be done instantly don't you?
 
Enough already. They are not tracking your location. This data is recording the location of cellphone towers and wifi hotspots. It functions as a cache to speed up location acquisition but it still requires some real time signal sensing from your device to give you any level of acceptable accuracy such as coordinates from the GPS satellites themselves.

People who noticed that the recorded places that they had not been to saw data from before they owned the device and it was still in transit from the factory to their home town.
 
Just like to say this whole thing has been blown completely out of proportion and we should be focusing on the up coming iMac refresh...

On a completely separate note Jobs, looks hilarious in this photo almost belittling the camera man with that look!
 
kdarling said:
As someone who has to track down things like this constantly, I'm pretty unimpressed at the (lack of) speed of their code checking. This was not an obscure bug or complicated. It was just a too-large buffer definition and an execution path that always downloaded info.

And people think Apple can check binary app store submissions for bugs or trojans in just a few minutes, when they can't even find their own bugs in a few days with commented source code.
Click to expand...

Try enabling Certificate Revocation checking on your fully updated Mac OS X install and see how long it takes for Mac App Store to show up and how long it then takes to go through the various tabs.

Also for fun - try enabling password for the screensaver and 60 minute idle logout. Then put your laptop to sleep and come back 60 min later only to have hung login window that accepts no input - works that way every time for me.

For all the jabs they took at Windows - Apple's is most untested OS after Linux distros. Looks like they only do surface tests - only the defaults are covered.
 
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