Part XVII of the Apple Location Tracking Saga: Or, the one where Steve Jobs maybe responds.

Senators, representatives, state officials and entire foreign countries have all requested a response from Apple regarding the involuntary logging of location data in iOS devices.

And according to MacRumors, Apple’s Steve Jobs has broken his silence to a random, unnamed MacRumors reader.  Here’s the alleged email correspondence:

Q: Steve,

Could you please explain the necessity of the passive location-tracking tool embedded in my iPhone? It’s kind of unnerving knowing that my exact location is being recorded at all times. Maybe you could shed some light on this for me before I switch to a Droid. They don’t track me.

A: Oh yes they do. We don’t track anyone. The info circulating around is false.

Sent from my iPhone

Always the skeptic, I of course question the legitimacy of this brief conversation…but if that response doesn’t sound like Steve Jobs then I don’t know what does.  The only way I would’ve been sure that it was really Jobs is if he would’ve referred to the claims as “magical.”

The unidentified sender of the email query should be told that tests confirmed last week the Google was also mining for location data through Android devices much more aggressively and much less anonymously than they led on.

Today, more information emerged about the now famous consolidated.db file.  The WSJ reported that through their own tests they found that disabling location services on your iDevices does not stop the logging of location data.  Many had thought this would be a quick fix to the problem.

Whether this was really Jobs or not, you have to expect a more formal response in the next few days.  The media firestorm around this topic began almost a week ago.