Joining Apple in court over how their smart phones deal with location data collection is Google. Two women from Michigan are suing the Android folks over the way the smart phones deal with location data:
The lawsuit, filed late Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Detroit, comes a week after Google acknowledged that phones running its Android software store some location data directly on phones for a short time from users who have chosen to use GPS services.
Google said that was done “to provide a better mobile experience on Android devices.” It also stressed that any location sharing is done with the user’s permission.
In the lawsuit, filed by Julie Brown and Kayla Molaski, the women said they did not approve.
The tracking capability puts “users at serous risk of privacy invasions, including stalking,” the women’s lawyer Steven Budaj wrote in the complaint.
The lawsuit is believed to be the first of its kind filed in the United States.
I’m really not sure about the merits about this lawsuit, but IANAL. Maybe they have something here. We’ll see as soon as next week as Apple and Google are being called on the carpet by the U.S. Senate to explain all of this location tracking stuff to a bunch of politicians who think that the Internet is a series of tubes. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Google and Apple smart phone OS users may have some software updates on or about the time of these hearings.
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This entry was posted on April 30, 2011 at 4:26 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Google, Lawsuit, Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Google Gets Sued Over Location Data Collection
Joining Apple in court over how their smart phones deal with location data collection is Google. Two women from Michigan are suing the Android folks over the way the smart phones deal with location data:
The lawsuit, filed late Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Detroit, comes a week after Google acknowledged that phones running its Android software store some location data directly on phones for a short time from users who have chosen to use GPS services.
Google said that was done “to provide a better mobile experience on Android devices.” It also stressed that any location sharing is done with the user’s permission.
In the lawsuit, filed by Julie Brown and Kayla Molaski, the women said they did not approve.
The tracking capability puts “users at serous risk of privacy invasions, including stalking,” the women’s lawyer Steven Budaj wrote in the complaint.
The lawsuit is believed to be the first of its kind filed in the United States.
I’m really not sure about the merits about this lawsuit, but IANAL. Maybe they have something here. We’ll see as soon as next week as Apple and Google are being called on the carpet by the U.S. Senate to explain all of this location tracking stuff to a bunch of politicians who think that the Internet is a series of tubes. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Google and Apple smart phone OS users may have some software updates on or about the time of these hearings.
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This entry was posted on April 30, 2011 at 4:26 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Google, 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.