Apple Activates the Reality Distortion Field: The iPhone Isn't Tracking You. Really! [Update]

You know things are bad in the Apple (AAPL) ecosystem when the company tries to explain its side of some controversy. The latest Apple reality distortion field targets the exploding location-tracking controversy.

If anything could put Apple -- and Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) -- on the defensive, it's the way privacy, a topic that much of high tech thought it could safely ignore, has turned into a PR hand grenade. With the pin pulled. At this point, explanations are too little too late, and chances are growing that the wireless industry will end up with regulation on their hands. Still, Apple hopes the Cupertino HypnoRay will save the day.

But that's silly. Maybe if this had been the first privacy issue to surface, Apple might have had a chance with obfuscation. But, for years, tech companies have ignored warnings about cavalier treatment of user privacy:

• In 1990, some news organizations began to cover how computers made a new level of consumer tracking possible.
• The topic began to catch the attention of politicians in the late 1990s.
• The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 54 percent of American Internet users were very concerned about privacy in 2000.
• The FTC started to address consumer concerns about spyware in 2004.
• By 2007, the predictive abilities of online ad networks, including those from Google and Yahoo (YHOO), sounded downright creepy.
• Congress began to take a strong look at online behavioral marketing in 2009.

At least Google and Microsoft have admitted they were tracking. Apple, on the other hand, indulges itself in solipsistic reality distortion, assuming that spin will fix all. The company has the gall to state, "Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so," only to follow with this statement:

The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it's maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Calculating a phone's location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple.

And, by the way, that year's worth of data cached on your iPhone doesn't really contain past locations. It's just the locations of all the Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers that surround you. That's like saying, "We don't know exactly where you are, only what building you're in."

And what of the continued updates of that location data, even if you've turned off location services? Oh, sorry, yet another Apple system software bug that somehow got through the company's rigorous development and testing processes. You know, just like the mistake that made signal strength on an iPhone look higher than it actually was. Only, in this case, Apple doesn't have AT&T (T) to blame.

[Update: So much for that "bug." Ryan Tate at Gawker remembered a 2009 Apple patent application called Location Histories for Location Aware Devices. Given that John Gruber at Daring Fireball, with its notably well-connected Apple sources, has floated the idea that the historic location data was supposed to be culled but wasn't due to a bug, you could make an educated guess that this is the explanation Apple's trying to fly. But the patent squashes that like a prematurely hatched moth. Clearly keeping an ongoing record of location data was Apple's intent from the start. Would I love to hear how company representatives dance around the questions they're likely to get in Congress over this spin.]

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