I had a feeling this was coming. The very first lawsuit has been filed against Apple for the highly controversial tracking of location data from the iPhone and iPad.
According to Bloomberg, a lawsuit was filed against Apple on April 22nd in Tampa, Florida, at a federal court by iPhone user, Vikram Ajjampur, and iPad user, William Devito. The two iDevice users claim that Apple has been surreptitiously tracking the location of iPhone and iPad owners.
They claim to have filed the lawsuit in an effort to stop the alleged data collection by Apple.
“The complaint cited a report last week by two computer programmers claiming that Apple’s iOS4 operating system is logging latitude-longitude coordinates along with the time a spot is visited. The programmers said Apple devices are collecting about a year’s worth of location data. Apple hasn’t commented on the matter since the April 20 report was released.
“We take issue specifically with the notion that Apple is now basically tracking people everywhere they go,” Aaron Mayer, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said today in a telephone interview. “If you are a federal marshal, you have to have a warrant to do this kind of thing, and Apple is doing it without one.”
While Apple CEO Steve Jobs debunked the circulating rumors regarding the tracking of data, and experts on the issue call the location database non-threatening, legal, and probably a simple mistake on Apple’s end, could this really be that serious?
Are you concerned about this issue, or is this whole privacy issue overblown like antennagate?
What say you?