Apple chairman and CEO Steve Jobs speaks at an Apple event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco, Wednesday, March 2, 2011. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
Although Apple was silent for several days after researchers raised issues about location information being stored on the iPhone, that wasn’t because it was ignoring the issue.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs told Mobilized that the company wanted to figure out exactly what was and wasn’t happening, and then figure out the best way to explain a complex set of issues to its customers.
“We’re an engineering-driven company,” Jobs said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “When people accuse us of things, the first thing we want to do is find out the truth. That took a certain amount of time to track all of these things down. And the accusations were coming day by day. By the time we had figured this all out, it took a few days. Then writing it up and trying to make it intelligible when this is a very high-tech topic took a few days. And here we are less than a week later.”
During the phone interview, Jobs and senior vice presidents Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall talked about what information the iPhone is and isn’t collecting, some lessons learned and the need for the industry to do a better job of explaining things to customers.
Jobs declined to say whether he thought Google or others needed to do a better job on privacy issues, but did note that Apple’s approach is different. “Some of them don’t do what we do,” Jobs said. “That’s for sure.”
To read the complete interview with Steve Jobs, as well as an explanation of why the white iPhone took so darn long, see AllThingsD.com.
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