April 27, 2011, 3:03 PM — It turns out the best-developed collective talent at Apple isn't design or marketing, but delusion.
Unfortunately it's not always clear whether the smoke and mirrors are more confusing to people outside Apple than in.
Today Apple released a statement reaffirming Steve Jobs' own straightforward avowal that Apple's iPhone does not track the location of iPhone owners and store the time-stamped information in an unencrypted log that could pose a tremendous threat to the privacy of those iPhone owners.
Apple denies any of its devices track customers, despite the Wall Street Journal and any number of tech publications having found the log files, opened them and published specifics on how the tracking is done, where the logs are stored and how difficult it is to get them to stop.
"Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone," the statement read. "Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so."
Apple will, however, issue a software update to eliminate the customer-location-tracking that it is not doing. It will do so in response to the immense public outcry over the privacy invading potential of unencrypted log files that do not exist.
It may or may not amend, retract or admit the existence of such a capability in the future, however.
It may do that especially if the U.S. Patent Office grants Apple a patent on tracking customer locations, storing the information in a log and displaying that information when an application, the customer or a criminally minded passerby requests it:
Apple's patent application describes a "location aware mobile device...that can collect network information...translated to estimated position coordinates...for display on a map view or for other purposes. A user or application can query the location history database with a timestamp or other query to retrieve all or part of the location history."
I'm sure that's not the kind of contradiction that would draw any interest during the investigation just launched by the House Energy and Commerce Committee into how Apple and other smartphone makers track user locations and what they do with the information.
" We don't track anyone. The info circulating around is false," Jobs said.
So that's all cleared up.
