14 DAY TRIAL // Apple is named as co-defendant in two recently filed privacy lawsuits which claim that several iOS applications illegally shared user identification data with advertisers.
Both complaints were filed in California Northern District Court on behalf of iPhone users and are seeking class action status. They might be consolidated into a single case at a later date.
The accusation against Apple is that it allowed privacy violating applications onto its App Store despite claims of enforcing strong privacy protections for customers.
"Apple claims to review each application before offering it to users, purports to have implemented app privacy standards, and claims to have created 'strong privacy protections' for its customers."
"However, Plaintiffs have discovered that some of these apps have been transmitting their personal, identifying information ('PII') to advertising networks without obtaining their consent," one complaint reads, according to The Register.
Companies behind popular apps like Paper Toss, Pandora Radio, Textplus4, Weather Channel, Dictionary.com, Talking Tom Cat or Pumpkin Maker are also named as defendants in the lawsuits.
They are accused of sharing or selling user data such as location, age, gender, income, ethnicity, sexual orientation, political views and Unique Device Identifiers (UDIDs) to one or more advertising networks.
These actions violate Apple's developer agreement, revised in April of this year, which states that "the use of any personal information should be limited solely as necessary to provide services or functionality for Your Application (e.g., the use of collected personal information for telemarketing purposes is prohibited (unless expressly consented to by the user))."
The complaint alleges that Apple never really made an effort to enforce the new restrictions upon developers that breached the agreement and possibly violated other state and national laws in the process.
The lawsuits are based on the results of an investigation conducted by the Wall Street Journal and are highly similar in context to the ones filed against Facebook app developers after it was discovered that they were passing user IDs (UIDs) to advertisers.
Both iPhone UDIDs and Facebook UIDs can arguably be used to track people's behavior. For example, several apps of a similar type sending the same UDID to an advertising network would clearly indicate a particular taste of that device's owner.