location data

A European data protection panel ruled this week that information on the location of users should be classed as private, reports the Financial Times. It means that companies such as Apple and Google are facing tighter regulation the Europe.

The panel that advises the European Commission made its proposals that could be written into Europe's revised Data Protection Directive this year, the FT said. These proposals are a first step to formulating a law on mobile phone location data.

The Federal Communications Commission is about to conduct a “public education forum” where it will discuss the issues of consumers’ location data tracking. As a part of this discussion the FCC invited Apple, Google and consumer advocates to a forum scheduled for late June.

On June 28 the FCC will be talking about the risks and benefits of location-based services with wireless carriers, other technology companies and consumer advocacy groups, the FCC said on Tuesday.

This week Apple Inc released an update to fix a problem in its iOS software that allowed its mobile devices to collect and store users’ location data. Last week Steve Jobs promised to adjust the company's mobile software to store less location data.

The update is available through iTunes stores. Besides, it automatically pops up when an iPhone or iPad is synced, said it "contains changes to the iOS crowd-sourced location database cache."

On Monday CNET reported that the mobile operating system of Microsoft also tracks users’ location data and sends it back to the company’s servers. Unlike the Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android, Windows Phone does not store location details on the device.

Microsoft has said in the Help and how-to subsection under the Windows Phone paragraph that when location services for Windows phones are switched on, the devices transmit a unique ID along with nearby wireless networks, their signal strength, and GPS-extracted location to the company's servers.

iPhones and iPads track users locations and store these details in an unencrypted file on the devices as well on the users’ PCs, according to a finding by researchers. Collection of such data started with Apple iOS4. It is stored as a SQLite file on iPhones and iPads with 3G feature, says Pete Warden, the founder of Data Science Toolkit and a former Apple employee, and Alasdair Allan, a senior research fellow at the University of Exeter.