AAPL Company

Steve Jobs speaks on location issues, Apple will be testifying before Congress

Seth Weintraub | Apr 27 2011 - 10:40 am PT

http://s.wsj.net/media/swf/microPlayer.swf

(Jobs and Andy Rubin at AllthingsD earlier this year)

Steve Jobs spoke with AllThingsD’s Ina Fried about the location controversy today. Jobs said:

“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.”

Unfortunately, that data followed around a user for a year. It seems the iPhone cached the crowdsourced location data files for specific coordinates based on where the user was. While helpful to the user in getting coordinates quickly, it also left a year long trail of location data for applications to make those pretty awesome/scary maps of your movements.

Whether that data was crowdsoursed or not, it gives a trail of locations which is what needed to be addressed.

Apple of course admitted it wasn’t diligent in auditing the software to make sure that information wasn’t stored longer than necessary. It will fix these “bugs” in an upcoming update. Jobs continued:

“As new technology comes into the society there is a period of adjustment and education,” Jobs said. “We haven’t as an industry done a very good job educating people I think, as to some of the more subtle things going on here. As such (people) jumped to a lot of wrong conclusions in the last week.”

He said Apple looks forward to testifying before Congress and other regulatory bodies and said the company will do what it can to clarify things further.

“I think Apple will be testifying,” Jobs said. “They have asked us to come and we will honor their request of course.”

Who gets that lucky job? Our money is on Forstall whose responsible for iOS software and frankly the buck stops with him on this issue.