Apple: Big Brother no more?

Apple says it's not tracking you on your iPhone or iPad.

"Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so," the company said on its website today. 

But in its first public announcement in the week since two reasearchers raised privacy concerns, Apple announced that it will make changes to the way it stores data.

It's adding a software update that corrects a programming error that allowed Wi-Fi hotspots data to be stored for up to 12 months.

Here's how Apple put it in today's announcement:

Sometime in the next few weeks Apple will release a free iOS software update that:

• reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone,

• ceases backing up this cache, and

• deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.

In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone.

Privacy advocates were quick to comment on today's move.

“This all demonstrates the complexity of privacy protection with locational services,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Information Privacy Center, told the New York Times. "Apple is moving in the right direction, but there is more that needs to be done.”