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Apple Sued for Letting iPhone App Devs Send Info to Advertisers

By: , IntoMobile
Tuesday, December 28th, 2010 at 9:55 AM
Apple-rotten

Apple and a handful of iPhone app developers, like Pandora, Paper Toss, the Weather Channel, and Dictionary.com are under legal fire for sending personal information to advertisers without the consent of app users. Jonathan Lalo is seeking class-action status for the suit, which claims that information like location, age, gender, income, ethnicity, sexual orientation and political views are being sold to ad agencies in violation of privacy laws.

Apple’s still relatively new to the mobile advertising game, what with their own iAd network just getting started, but they’ve been enabling apps to advertise on third-party networks for a long time now. Given, some of that information is no doubt a necessity for ad systems to work and provide contextually-relevant content, but one would hope that iPhone users have always been aware of the information that’s being collected while they go about their business. Android and BlackBerry apps at least have the courtesy to ask for permissions before installing; iPhone only really asks if you want to share your location. That’s good and all, since there’s definitely a burgeoning market in location-based advertising, but if there’s a whole lot of other info that iPhone owners don’t know that they’re sending, this case could get ugly.

If you’d like to dig up more info on the case, it’s Lalo v. Apple, 10-5878, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Jose).

[via Bloomberg]

About The Author

Simon Sage

Simon Sage’s education largely surrounded writing, technology and online community, leading him to begin his blogging career at www.BlackBerryCool.com and to quickly discover a vibrant and active community surrounding BlackBerry and mobile technology. In exploring RIM’s platform, he has learned what enterprises are looking for in mobility as well as what makes the innocuous BlackBerry so appealing to them. Recently Simon’s been covering RIM’s gradual move into an already-crowded consumer market, and the impact of burgeoning challengers, such as the iPhone, as well as long-time leaders, like Nokia, on BlackBerry’s advancement. With plenty of content under his belt, Simon will be branching off a bit to see what other smartphone manufacturers are working on while still using BlackBerry as a barometer. At IntoMobile, you can count on his posts being even-handed, well-informed and thought-out.

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    Interesting you brought iAD into the equation as I didn’t see any mention of it in any of the other reports. It looks like the lawsuit strictly claims violation of third party apps sharing the iPhone and iPads’ Unique Device Identifier (UDID). The WSJ has a bit more coverage on some of the apps and the info being sent. Apparently this os not an Apple only issue but affects a few Android Apps as well http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704694004576020083703574602.html

  • http://twitter.com/Geek_News Geek_News

    Interesting you brought iAD into the equation as I didn’t see any mention of it in any of the other reports. It looks like the lawsuit strictly claims violation of third party apps sharing the iPhone and iPads’ Unique Device Identifier (UDID). The WSJ has a bit more coverage on some of the apps and the info being sent. Apparently this os not an Apple only issue but affects a few Android Apps as well http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704694004576020083703574602.html