El reg reports that a customer named Chen Ma has filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of up to 100 million users for invading privacy.
From the friendly article:
Her complaint focuses on its Location Services software, which comes as standard on all Apple mobes.
In a legal filing, Ma alleged her "daily whereabouts would be tracked, recorded and transmitted to Apple database [sic] to be stored for future reference".
Her case was sparked by a report on CCTV, China's state-sponsored broadcaster, which led her to believe Apple was "surreptitiously acquiring the data of her daily whereabouts down to every minutes [sic] without her knowledge, approval and permission."
A similar case was brought before a court last year and was rejected, Will this one be more successful? I personally doubt it, but no harm trying.
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OSnews is reporting along with TechRepublic and Android Police that a report stating that Google's app store is populated with fake apps with half carrying malware. From the OSnews article:
Antivirus peddler Trend Micro recently issued a "report", in which it states that "Google Play [is] populated with fake apps, with more than half carrying malware". Sounds scary, right?
Well, reality is a little different, as TechRepulic and Android Police found out.
It turns out that Trend Micro is guilty of a little over-eager language that obfuscated the nature of some of these threats. While there are indeed fake versions of many popular Android apps available for download, Trend failed to mention in their initial promotion for the report that the apps in question were posted outside the Play Store, and had to be installed manually in what's commonly known as a side-load. This requires users to download the app in a browser, ignore a standard security warning about APK files, and disable a security option in Android's main settings menu.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 26 2014, @09:10PM
in other news, eating lots of chocolate will make you fat.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday July 26 2014, @09:38PM
Did she get permission from each of these 100,000,000 people before adding them to her class action?
If not, can some of them launch their own class action against her for doing so?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by present_arms on Saturday July 26 2014, @09:44PM
That depends on whether she wins or not.
http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com/
(Score: 3, Informative) by Leebert on Saturday July 26 2014, @11:45PM
No, that's not the way class action lawsuits work. You can certainly exclude yourself from the class action lawsuit if you wish.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Sunday July 27 2014, @03:46AM
Marking an honest question as troll. Good job guys.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 3, Informative) by Lemming on Saturday July 26 2014, @09:59PM
This article on the Apple support site gives some more clarity on what the different uses of location services are: iOS 7: Understanding Location Services [apple.com].
It seems to me this class action suit is mostly about this part: "If Location Services is on, your device will periodically send the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple to augment Apple's crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower locations. In addition, if you're traveling (for example, in a car) and Location Services is on, a GPS-enabled iOS device will also periodically send GPS locations and travel speed information in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple to be used for building up Apple's crowd-sourced road traffic database. The crowd-sourced location data gathered by Apple doesn't personally identify you."
I think you can disable this without disabling all location services as described in this article [apple.com], but it is not very clear if they are talking about the same thing.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Saturday July 26 2014, @10:42PM
Turn off GPS/Location Services when unneeded and use the excellent Firewall [thebigboss.org] by Yllier [twitter.com] if you're jailbroken.
If not, well, get a VPS, install an iOS-compatible VPN service and use ipfw/nftables/iptables and block everything apple except for what you explicitly use (at your own risk).
Simple, really (YMMV).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 27 2014, @03:28PM
Seems simpler to just get an android.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Sunday July 27 2014, @05:16PM
Maybe, if you don't use one of the myriad of sound synthesizers, sequencers, and effects available only for iOS, or prefer a fast (low-latency) execution environment for your apps for other reasons.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Alfred on Monday July 28 2014, @01:42PM
So when you figure out your privacy is gone you are going to take it to, wait for it, the Government?? Because they got your back on this one?
I don't think this will turn out the way it should. She might get some money, which is all she wants, but there will be no real win here.