US begins probe into iPhone’s user location data retention

US begins probe into iPhone’s user location data retention. April. 22, 2011 23:52. sanhkim@donga.com.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has began an investigation amid reports that Apple iPhones secretly collected customer location information over the past 10 months, American media said Thursday.

Several congressmen including Democratic Senator Al Franken sent letters to Apple CEO Steve Jobs to question why the company was gathering user location data in an unencrypted format.

The British daily Guardian said a Swedish programmer found files in Google’s Android phones that store user movement data in a similar way to the iPhone. Unlike the iPhone, which stores the last 10 months of data on user locations, an Android phone retains the most recent one or two months data since it keeps a record of the last 50 mobile masts that it communicated with and the locations of 200 Wi-Fi networks.

In addition, the data files in Android phones are not easily accessible as those in iPhones.

On the findings, both Apple and Google declined comment.