Apple rejects China's claims over iPhone security threat
14 Jul 2014
Apple has rejected Chinese government claims that the iPhone threatened the country's national security through its ability to track and time-stamp user location.
Last week China's state broadcaster CCTV said the iPhone's ability to track a user via its positioning technology posed a national security threat (See: iPhone a national security threat: Chinese state media).
The frequent locations function, which users can turn on or off, is available on iOS 7, the operating system used by the current generation of iPhones released in September 2013.
"We appreciate CCTV's effort to help educate customers on a topic we think is very important," Apple said Saturday in a statement in Chinese and in English on its China website.
"We want to make sure all of our customers in China are clear about what we do and we don't do when it comes to privacy and your personal data."
According to Ma Ding, director of the Institute for Security of the Internet at People's Public Security University in Beijing, who spoke to Chinese state broadcaster CCTV on Friday, the frequent locations function could be used to gather "extremely sensitive data," and even state secrets.
However, Apple denied the claim saying it had never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of its products or services, it said.
Apple further stated that it also had never allowed access to its servers and never would. It was something the company felt strongly about Apple said.
Apple posted on its Chinese website that location-based data collected by iPhone was encrypted and stored locally on the device, so it was not available to Apple or any third party, ZD Net reported.
The CCTV report had also referred to the NSA-Snowden cyberspying revelations and described the databases of US tech companies as a "gold mine". It cited Chinese officials as saying that Apple must "take on any legal responsibilities" if any leaked data on the devices resulted in harm to users.
Apple said in its response that iPhone users expected their device to be able to "quickly and reliably" identify locations for various activities such as shopping, travel, and measuring the time needed to travel to a destination.
This data is processed at the device level and the company does not track the user's location, it added.
"We appreciate CCTV's effort to help educate customers on a topic we think is very important. We want to make sure all of our customers in China are clear about what we do and we don't do when it comes to privacy and your personal data.''
