Steve Jobs: We aren't tracking anyone

Even in normal times, it takes quite a lot to get Steve Jobs to emerge from the Fortress of Solitude - aka Apple's Cupertino, Calif. headquarters - and comment on tech issues of the day. It's even that much harder now that Apple's CEO is on medical leave to tend to his health issues. But in a change from the usual script, Jobs broke with his usual reluctance to engage the public to offer his spin on the growing controversy involving the iPhone's use of personal location information.

Earlier today, Apple issued a statement to the effect that the data file uncovered by researchers and publicized last week is not a log of a phone's location. Apple says what they found was a list of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers nearby and that that helps the phone figure out its location without having to listen for faint signals from GPS satellites.

So it was that Jobs hammered home that message with a subsequent interview with the tech blog AllThingsDigital, making the case that the critics got it wrong. "We haven't been tracking anyone," Jobs said. "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."

He added that the introduction of technology into society invariably involves "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."

He also indicated that Apple representatives would appear before Congress and other regulatory bodies.

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