There’s no doubting that the so called “locationgate” issue, originally coined to refer to the collecting of location data from an iOS device without the original permission of the device’s owner, has been blown well out of proportion by the media over the last few weeks – and Apple knows this.
That’s why, instead of releasing a statement to clarify the issue immediately, they waited a week.
Apple approaches damage control like a field day at a marketing agency. Sure, not all media attention will be positive all of the time, but with a brand name (reality-distortion field?) as strong and as robust as the one Apple has built for itself over the years, bad press isn’t necessarily a bad thing anymore.
Chris Rawson for TUAW reports:
Typically, whenever something goes wrong with a company or its products and services, the company will try to head off a media free-for-all by releasing a brief statement that usually does only two things: it acknowledges that a problem exists and promises more information at a later date. But as Jason Snell at Macworld notes, Apple doesn’t work that way. He notes that Apple’s response to the so-called “locationgate” issue was almost identical to its reaction to “antennagate” last year.
Instead of doing what everyone expected them to do, which was acknowledge the location tracking issue and promise a fix, Apple let the media have a field day for a week before releasing its official statement.