Apple Named in Class Action Lawsuit Over Carrier IQ Privacy Issues

[PhantomZone]

"**** it, sue everyone."

Welcome to America! I'm sure if a shadow could be considered a stalker, an American would sue it!!

 

[bearcatrp]

Good to see all involved to get sued. To bad they will all walk away clean since the Feds require the recordings under the patriot act crap. Will be interesting if they went beyond the requirements though.

 

[Cartaphilus]

And in the unlikely case that Apple or any other party is found liable (or, more likely, yields to the reality that the case can be settled for less than it would cost to defend) the class action lawyers will receive millions, the few named class representatives will receive a few thousand, and everyone else will receive, once they navigate all the paperwork requirements, a swell coupon good for something like 30 minutes of off-peak cellular telephone usage.
Class action suits of this nature and the lawyers who pursue them are blot on the American legal system. More often than not, they are simply legalized extortion rackets.

This particular suit may never be granted class-action status, since reportedly the data collected and its use by each carrier and manufacturer was different. Under Federal law a class action can only be certified when a judge finds, among other things, that there is commonality among the members of the class. Nonetheless, it will take a year and hundreds of thousands of dollars to reach even this point. The wheels of justice may grind fine, but they grind very slowly, and very, very expensively.

If there is real harm to a substantial number of people, then let law enforcement pursue a civil or criminal case against the offending parties, fining them or locking up their managers if they prove their case. Handing out tin stars to a bunch of ambulance chasers is a great way to generate campaign contributions, but a terrible way to protect the populace.

 

[00sjsl]

All carriers know when and where you initiate or answer a call -- until I moved to iPhone, my network used to give me a refund for any dropped calls, and knew whether the call terminated early or unexpectedly due to network fault or my pressing the END button. This facility was offered to me 6 or 7 years ago, which means that the very least my network has been logging are all key presses from my phone.

The network does not need to log key presses to know whether a call was dropped or ended by the user. The phone sends a RELEASE message to the network when the user ends the call.

 

[SandynJosh]

Why doesn't the headline say "Samsung and other companies" instead of "Apple and other companies" ?

I'm sick of all these tech blogs placing Apple at the top when in fact they sell less phones than the other companies do.

You don't retain information well, do you? Apple outsell all the other manufacturers, while COMBINED they outsell Apple.

And on top of that Android is the worst offender here.

I agree, but the lawyers are on a fishing expedition here. They smell blood in the water and will go after anything that's swimming.

 

[kironin]

Verizon isn't listed because they didn't use Carrier IQ.

Yes, that means all those Android phones we all love to hate on Verizon never were impacted by this.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscent...n_says_it_doesnt_use_carrier_iq_software.html

Not so fast....

Eckhart reported that Carrier IQ software runs on Verizon phones as well as those from RIM and Nokia. Developers have reported that they have some evidence that shows some Verizon phones run the software. Verizon did not immediately respond to a request for comment about those findings.