Apple, Inc., “is deeply committed to protecting the privacy of our customers who use Apple mobile devices, including iPhone, iPad and iPod touch,” a company representative told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Tuesday.
“Apple does not track users’ locations — Apple has never done so and has no plans to do so,” Dr. Guy “Bud” Tribble, vice president for software technology at Apple Inc., said in prepared testimony before the Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law.
Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) called the hearing after it was revealed that iPhones were keeping a record of everywhere users had traveled since June.
Last month, Franken wrote a letter to Apple CEO Steve Jobs asking for answer on why iPhones were storing latitude-longitude coordinates and timestamps. Franken hasn’t proposed specific action to deal with data privacy yet, but Tuesday’s hearing included testimony from representatives of the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department. Apple hasn’t taken a formal position on whether federal “Do Not Track” legislation — like that proposed by Sen. John Rockefeller (D-W. Va) yesterday — is necessary, but tech companies have opposed similar state-level legislation in the past.
“When I was growing up and people talk about protecting privacy, they talk about protecting it from the government,” Franken said Tuesday. “They talked about unreasonable searches and seizures and about keeping the government out of our families and bedrooms. They talked about the government trying to keep tabs on the books I read and the rallies I attend.”
“We still have to protect ourselves from government abuses and that is a big part of the digital privacy debate,” Franken said. “We also have relationships with large corporations that are obtaining and storing increasingly large amounts of our information.”
“Once the maker of a mobile application, a company like Apple or Google or even your wireless company get your location information, in many cases, under current federal law, these companies are free to disclose your location information and other sensitive information to almost anyone they please without letting you know,” Franken said. “Then the company’s share your information with and sell it to others. Without letting you know. This is a problem. This is a serious problem. I think that is something the American people should be aware of. I think it is a problem we should be looking at.”
