iPhone users in South Korea sue Apple for privacy invasion
(CBS) - Some 27,000 angry iPhone users in South Korea have banded together to sue Apple for violating their privacy.
The Associated Press reports, "Each person in the suit is seeking 1 million won ($932) in damages, Kim Hyeong-seok, one of their attorneys, said Wednesday."
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According to Eric Mack at PC World, Hyeong-seok sued the company himself and won the $932 in damages. Mack goes on to predict that the outcome does not look good for Apple. He pointed out, "its Korean operation has already been fined about $3,000 for violating location information laws by the Korean Communications Commission."
If Apple loses the case, it'll cost the computer giant $25 million.
Bloomberg reports that Apple has already been fined by South Korean telecommunications regulators on August 3. The company has been "ordered to encrypt location data of people using iPhones to address privacy concerns."
The source of Apple's problems came in April of 2011, when O'Reilly bloggers discovered that iPhones and 3G iPads were tracking users and sending their data to Apple servers - regardless of location service settings. To prove their point, bloggers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden created a program called "iPhone Tracker" that displayed a map of users' movements.
Apple acknowledged the creepy spying and stated it was a "software bug." An update soon followed that corrected the "error."
