While Steve Jobs would not make himself available for the announcement of the Verizon iPhone earlier this year, Apple’s (AAPL) co-founder and chief executive is all over the place defending the company’s practices of storing location data on iOS devices.
“We haven’t been tracking anybody,” Mr. Jobs told New York Times reporter Miguel Helft earlier today. “Never have. Never will.”
Jobs added to Helft:
“The first thing we always do when a problem is brought to us is we try to isolate it and find out if it is real,” he said. “It took us about a week to do an investigation and write a response, which is fairly quick for something this technically complicated.”
Jobs took the longer view with All Things Digital Mobilized columnist Ina Fried.
“As new technology comes into the society there is a period of adjustment and education. 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. I think the right time to educate people is when there is no problem. I think we will probably ask ourselves how we can do some of that, as an industry.”
Other notable news coming out of Apple’s public relations campaign today, which began with a published Q&A on Location Data and later involved interviews with Jobs and fellow Apple senior executives Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall:
Perhaps he can grease Al Franken and others with a white iPhone, which officially comes out tomorrow.
