[Update] Steve Jobs Interview: “We Haven’t Been Tracking Anyone”

Update 1: More of this morning’s interview has been posted online. Here’s an excerpt (full edited transcript here):

Steve, how active have you been in examining this issue over the past couple of weeks?

Jobs: It hasn’t been a couple of weeks. This all started last Wednesday and we put out our response this morning. It took us slightly less than a week. Scott and Phil and I have worked together over this last week, first to investigate the problem.

We’re an engineering-driven company. 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.

In an interview with Mobilized, Steve Jobs clarified Apple’s intentions with regards to iOS tracking. Apple already released a press statement answering questions earlier today.

Here’s what he had to say:

“We haven’t been tracking anyone,” Jobs said in a telephone interview with Mobilized on Wednesday. “The files they found on these phones, as we explained, it turned out were basically files we have built through anonymous, crowdsourced information that we collect from the tens of millions of iPhones out there.”

Steve says people haven’t been educated properly by the tech industry leading to some people freaking out:

“As new technology comes into the society there is a period of adjustment and education,” Jobs said. “We haven’t as an industry done a very good job educating people I think, as to some of the more subtle things going on here. As such (people) jumped to a lot of wrong conclusions in the last week.”

The US Congress wants to hear from Apple over this tracking issue and Apple will oblige:

“I think Apple will be testifying,” Jobs said. “They have asked us to come and we will honor their request of course.”

Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller were also joined in on the interview. More to come…

 


[Mobilized ]

 

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