The recent discovery of a “location history database” built into iOS (the OS employed by the humble iPhone) – which effectively tracked users’ locations and activities – has finally been addressed by the Big Apple himself: CEO of the company, Steve Jobs.

According to the website MacRumors (macrumors.com), a concerned reader wrote directly to Jobs regarding a file built into iOS named “consolidated.db”, which keeps a record of precise locations via longitude and latitude co-ordinates. A visualisation of this data, which could be effectively used to pinpoint an iPhone user on a map, was created by enterprising researchers via a program for Mac OS X, sparking media attention and rather a large amount of paranoia in iPhone users. The anonymous reader who wrote to Jobs cited the idea as “unnerving” and threatened to switch to Android – an OS designed for smartphones which is becoming an increasingly popular rival to the iPhone and other competitors such as the BlackBerry – unless Jobs gave a response. “[Android] don’t track me,” claimed the reader.

Steve Jobs’ response was to call the idea that the information could be circulated “false”, saying verbatim that, “we [Apple] don’t track anyone.” While there is no evidence to suggest that Apple themselves receive the information – so Jobs is technically correct – the major concern amongst iPhone users is that the location logs continue to exist, and the signal towers continue to triangulate their locations whenever possible. Although it is also extremely unlikely that the data is being transferred elsewhere, an unencrypted file secretly lurking in iOS is prompting an increase in a switch to Android.

Android also contains its own tracking system – the difference being that, as more data is added, older data is removed, meaning that any location history sourced from Android will be much more limited, focusing on the here and now… giving users the advantage of knowing exactly where they are at any moment.

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