Apple sued in South Korea over location tracking
22 Aug 2011
Angry South Korean owners of iPhones, iPads and Ipod Touch are suing Apple for infringing their privacy by collecting their location data on these devices.
After it was revealed in April this year that the iPhones and iPads tracked and stored locations of users, about 27,000 South Koreans have jointly filed a lawsuit in Changwon, South Korea against the Cupertino, California-based company seeking 27 billion won, or around $26 million in damages for privacy violations.
The suit alleges that Apple's devices stored unencrypted location data obtained from mobile network towers and Wi-Fi hot spots for nearly a year, which infringes on the user's privacy and opens the door for personal information coming under attack.
If Apple loses the suit, it would have to pay about $930 to each litigant - an insignificant amount for a company sitting on a $75.9 billion cash pile.
In April, two British security researchers had found out that Apple's iOS was secretly recording location data on the iPhone and the iPad 3G and storing them in a secret file on the devices.
Apple responded by saying that its devices were not tracking users location, but was maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around users current location so that the devices could help the user from accurately calculating the device location if requested by the user.
Apple also said that its devices were supposed to store location data only for seven days, and the year-long collection was an iOS bug.
