Two men have taken a ground-breaking lawsuit against Apple Inc in the US over its controversial location tracking on iPads and iPhones.
Vikram Ajjampur, an iPhone user from Florida, USA, and William Devito, an iPad user from New York, brought the case before a federal court in Tampa, Florida.
The lawsuit comes on the back of the emergence of a report last week about two computer programmers alleging that Apple’s iOS4 operating system is recording latitude – longitude coordinates along with a timestamp.
There has yet to be evidence provided to support this claim, however, and it is not certain that the company is storing this information on databases owned by Apple.
Mr Ajjampur and Mr Devito allege that they were unaware of their locations being tracked and did not consent to it.
They also state that “Apple collects the location information covertly, surreptitiously and in violations of law” and believe that users are “at serious risk of privacy invasions, including stalking”.
They say they are bringing the action on behalf of themselves and “proposed plaintiff class members”, who are: “All persons in the USA who have purchased, owned or carried around an iPhone with the iOS 4 operating system or a 3G iPad between the release of those products for sale by Apple and the present. Excluded from the Class are those who purchased the products for resale; members of the federal judiciary and their relatives; and Defendant’s officers, directors and employees.”
This could mean millions of people, as 59 million people now own an iPhone, while the iPad has 10 million users.
