Senate to Continue to Question Apple and Google

Both Apple and Google are due back on Capitol Hill Thursday. The companies will again appear before a Senate committee to address the issue of privacy; however, this time they will be joined by Facebook CTO Bret Taylor.

Google's public policy director Alan Davidson, Apple's government affairs VP Catherine Novelli and Facebook's CTO Bret Taylor, will all meet Thursday to address the uproar over location tracking by mobile devices. The recent upset began when a location database file was discovered on the iPhone.

It’s the latest outgrowth of a mini-furor over how mobile devices make use of location-based data. The recent interest in the issue began after attention was focused on a little-known location database stored on the iPhone as well as the fact that Google and others collect location-based data to build global databases of things like traffic and the location of Wi-Fi signals. By the time Apple noted, a week later, that it was not tracking individual users and that the data customers were seeing was a locally-stored subset of a global crowdsourced database, lawsuits had been filed and regulators were already calling for hearings.


The hearing titled 'Consumer Privacy and Protection in the Mobile Marketplace' is scheduled for 10 a.m. on Thursday before the Consumer Protection and Product Safety subcommittees.

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