You knew this was coming the second the news about the fact that the iPhone and iPad tracks your movement and stores it in an unencrypted file. A federal lawsuit has been filed over this whole affair:
The suit against Apple, which was filed Monday in Florida, is seeking class-action status and accuses Apple of using the GPS feature on iOS-based devices or cell-tower triangulation to pinpoint user location and then stores that data in an unencrypted format, all without the consent or knowledge of the user.
“All iPhones log, record and store users’ locations based on latitude and longitude alongside a timestamp. The iPhones store this information in a file called “consolidated.db” or something similar. Apple intentionally began recording this information with the release of its iOS 4 operating system in June 2010. Apple uses a cell-tower triangulation to obtain user location. Recording Your Moves. Alternatively, Apple may use global positioning system (GPS) data to obtain user location,” the suit alleges.
Lovely. It likely doesn’t help that a patent filed by Apple makes it really hard for them to claim that this was a mistake. Oh yeah. If that’s not enough, South Korea, Italy, Germany and other countries are all looking into this mess. This is not what Apple wants to hear and it could be a bigger threat to them than “antennagate.” Expect this to be playing out soon and expect some lawyers to be scoring some serious cash. Not to mention that it could seriously put a crimp in Apple’s record profits.
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This entry was posted on April 26, 2011 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple, iPhone, Lawsuit, Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Lawsuit Filed Over iPhone Tracking Circus…. And It Gets Worse For El Jobso
You knew this was coming the second the news about the fact that the iPhone and iPad tracks your movement and stores it in an unencrypted file. A federal lawsuit has been filed over this whole affair:
The suit against Apple, which was filed Monday in Florida, is seeking class-action status and accuses Apple of using the GPS feature on iOS-based devices or cell-tower triangulation to pinpoint user location and then stores that data in an unencrypted format, all without the consent or knowledge of the user.
“All iPhones log, record and store users’ locations based on latitude and longitude alongside a timestamp. The iPhones store this information in a file called “consolidated.db” or something similar. Apple intentionally began recording this information with the release of its iOS 4 operating system in June 2010. Apple uses a cell-tower triangulation to obtain user location. Recording Your Moves. Alternatively, Apple may use global positioning system (GPS) data to obtain user location,” the suit alleges.
Lovely. It likely doesn’t help that a patent filed by Apple makes it really hard for them to claim that this was a mistake. Oh yeah. If that’s not enough, South Korea, Italy, Germany and other countries are all looking into this mess. This is not what Apple wants to hear and it could be a bigger threat to them than “antennagate.” Expect this to be playing out soon and expect some lawyers to be scoring some serious cash. Not to mention that it could seriously put a crimp in Apple’s record profits.
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This entry was posted on April 26, 2011 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Apple, iPhone, Lawsuit, Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.