Facebook, Apple, and Twitter (and some others) are being sued for privacy issues once again. It seems these companies are not learning their lessons and the federal legislature is not putting out the laws to stop this fast enough. Here is an excerpt from an article that describes it in more detail:
************
Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Yelp, and 14 other companies have been hit with a lawsuit accusing them of distributing privacy-invading mobile applications.
The lawsuit was filed by a group of 13 individuals in the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas earlier this week. The suit charges 18 companies with surreptitiously gathering data from the address books of tens of millions of smartphone users.
“The defendants — several of the world’s largest and most influential technology and social networking companies — have unfortunately made, distributed and sold mobile software applications that, once installed on a wireless mobile device, surreptitiously harvest, upload and illegally steal the owner’s address book data without the owner’s knowledge or consent,” the lawsuit alleged.
The lawsuit seeks a permanent injunction against such data collection and the destruction of all personal data collected by mobile application vendors so far.
Most of the plaintiffs are from Austin and describe themselves in the complaint as users of Apple’s iPhone users Android-powered handsets.
One of the companies, social networking service Path, was pressured last month into issuing a public apology after a Singapore-based programmer wrote a blog post describing how the company’s journal application for iOS- and Android-based phones was secretly collecting address book data.
To read further go to: http://www.infoworld.com/d/security/facebook-apple-and-twitter-sued-privacy-invading-mobile-apps-188755
Follow
