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Apple has been hit with a class-action complaint in the US accusing the iGiant of playing fast and loose with the privacy of its customers.
The lawsuit [PDF], filed this month in a northern California federal district court, claims the Cupertino music giant gathers data from iTunes – including people's music purchase history and personal information – then hands that info over to marketers in order to turn a quick buck.
"To supplement its revenues and enhance the formidability of its brand in the eyes of mobile application developers, Apple sells, rents, transmits, and/or otherwise discloses, to various third parties, information reflecting the music that its customers purchase from the iTunes Store application that comes pre-installed on their iPhones," the filing alleged.
"The data Apple discloses includes the full names and home addresses of its customers, together with the genres and, in some cases, the specific titles of the digitally-recorded music that its customers have purchased via the iTunes Store and then stored in their devices' Apple Music libraries."
[...] Additionally, the lawsuit alleges the Music APIs Apple includes in its developer kit can allow third-party devs to harvest similarly detailed logs of user activity for their own use, further violating the privacy of iTunes customers.
The end result, the complaint states, is that Cook and Co are complacent in the illegal harvesting and reselling of personal data, all while pitching iOS and iTunes as bastions of personal privacy and data security.
If you are not paying for it, you are the product. But, just because you are paying for it, does not prevent you from being the product, too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 30 2019, @03:46PM
no--we need Freedom Privacy, where privacy given away for free, as opposed to protecting our privacy at any cost.
That's not true, of course, because they do spend money to protect the privacy of your data as it pertains to how you have been objectified after the data is collected. Ever try to request your person info as allowed by law? Some corporations go out of their way to make the data they have obtained on you very challenging to parse, if you can get it at all.