Apple Inc has denied reports that the company installed a tracking device on its iPhones to know the locations of users.

"Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone," the California-based company said in its first response to privacy questions raised by a pair of researchers."Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so."

Apple's CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement published on the Wall Street Journal that what the iPhones do was "maintain a database of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers to 'help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested."

Apple said the location data the researchers were seeing on the iPhone is "not the past or present location of the iPhone, but rather the locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers surrounding the iPhone's location, which can be more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone."

Apple also said it planned to reduce the amount of time the Wi-Fi and cell tower data is stored on the iPhone from as much as a year to seven days.

"The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we uncovered and plan to fix shortly," Apple said. "We don't think the iPhone needs to store more than seven days of this data." Apple said it was using location data to help target advertising but was not sharing it with third parties unless it has explicit approval from a user.

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