The M&M team aren’t suspicious. Only last week we replied promptly to a very kind email we received from a gentleman from Burkina Faso looking to share an extortionate amount of unclaimed money with us (we’re talking MILLIONS).
It’s a winner for both parties and although we haven’t heard anything from him in a while we’re pretty sure he’s just going through the tedious paperwork required to complete the transaction, since we paid the initial admin fee.
However, the ability of our iPhones to tell us where we are at any given moment and direct us home has stimulated our suspicious, tin-foil hat wearing, the moon landings were recorded in next door’s basement, conspiracy instincts.
After all, who knows the level of data our trusty little gadget could be collecting on us for some James Bond-esque villain on a Caribbean island somewhere to intercept and use for his own dastardly plan.
There have been claims this week that Apple has in fact been tracking users and collecting subsequent data that can be used to reconstruct a user’s movement. Never fear, the company has issued a rebuttal, right up there with Bill Clinton for its level of conviction.
"Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans ever to do so.”
So that’s that then…. Oh wait… There’s more.
"The location data that researchers are seeing on the iPhone is not the past or present location of the iPhone, but rather the locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and [mobile network] cell towers surrounding the iPhone's location, which can be more than 100 miles away from the iPhone. We plan to cease backing up this cache in a software update coming soon."
Apple has admitted that a bug in their phone means that users who choose to turn off location-sharing may still have been giving away their locations unwittingly. However, this encrypted data that is estimated to be stored for around a year is soon to be removed.
With privacy and consumer data a hot topic in for global governments and various different legislative changes in the offing this sort of laps could have serious implications for even brands as big as Apple.
It’s time M&M checked the bank balance again…