US SENATOR FRANKEN ASKS APPLE AND GOOGLE TO REQUIRE PRIVACY POLICIES FOR APPS

Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.) pinged Apple and Google Wednesday with a letter requesting that the two companies require apps distributed via their online marketplaces have "a clear, understandable privacy policy."

In the letter addressed to Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Google CEO Larry Page, Franken writes that such a requirement "would not resolve most of the privacy concerns in the mobile market.
"But it would be a simple first step that would provide users, privacy advocates, and federal consumer protection authorities a minimum of information about what information an app will access and how that app will share the information with third parties.

Noting that Apple's App Store and Google's Android Marketplace are by far the two largest online app distribution outlets in the world, Franken contended that the two companies were "in a unique position to influence the market for apps and protect users' privacy within the market."

At a minimum, Franken asked that Apple and Google require privacy policies for apps that use location tracking, technology that came under fire from privacy advocates when researchers publicized the existence of an unencrypted file storing location data on Apple's iPhones.
"Although I believe there is a greater need for transparency and disclosure for the collection and sharing of all personal information, at a minimum, I ask that you require all location-aware applications in your app stores to provide privacy policies that clearly specify what kind of location information is gathered from users, how that information is used, and how it is shared with third parties," the first-term Senator wrote.

APPLE SAYS "APPLE DOES NOT TRACK USERS LOCATION" TO US SENATE PANEL

While testifying before the U.S. Congress today, Apple’s vice president of software technology, Bud Tribble, tried to clarify concerns that Apple had been tracking owners of its iPhone and iPad Wi-Fi + 3G. Apple has said in the past that it does not track its users and it also recently issued iOS 4.3.3, which reduces and encrypts the crowd-sourced location database cache, but Tribble explained the story in a bit more detail:

We do not share customer information with third parties without our customers’ explicit consent. Apple does not track users’ locations. Apple has never done so and has no plans to do so. An Apple device does not send to Apply any specific information associated with a user. The purpose of the cache is to allow the device to more quickly and reliably respond to location requests. Apple was never tracking an individual user’s location. The data seen on the iPhone was not the location past or present of the iPhone, but the location of cell towers surrounding the phone. Although the cache was not encrypted, it was protected from other apps on the phone.

According to 9to5 Mac, Tribble also explained to the U.S. Congress that, as we know, the iPhone and 3G iPad are able to determine a user’s location using triangulation between nearby Wi-Fi hotspots or cell phone towers.