Apple’s Questionable Privacy Conduct ‘Highly Offensive’: Class Action

The second known privacy class action in four days seeking to hold Apple accountable for its allegedly deceptive use of personal data from iPhones and other devices (see 2302010017) was filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for Southern New York in Manhattan.

“For all of Apple’s promises regarding privacy and its consumers’ choice to keep their personal data private,” Apple still tracks such information “even when it leads consumers to believe they are not being tracked,” alleged plaintiff Barry Robinson in the new complaint (docket 1:23-cv-00877). Apple “has maligned its competitors and overtly advertised it does not need to track users to harvest data and make money from it,” but it does so anyway, it said.

Until recently, consumers “had no idea Apple was tracking their personal data to profit even when they specifically asked Apple not to,” said Robinson’s complaint. Robinson, a Bronx, New York, resident, owns an iPhone 12 Pro Max, MacBook Air and an iPad Pro, and he regularly shops Apple’s app store, it said. He expects Apple “to honor his privacy selections on his devices,” it said. After buying his iPhone, he turned off the “share iPhone analytics” option, but Apple “nevertheless accessed his data while these features were turned off,” it said.

The most devastating part of this “story of corporate greed” is that independent researchers determined that Apple “tracks its own consumers and their data for its benefit when it explicitly says it will not,” said the complaint. It cites the experience of two app developers and security researchers at the software company Mysk, who looked at the data collected by several iPhone apps. “They found the analytics control and other privacy settings had no obvious effect on Apple’s data collection,” it said.

The tracking “remained the same” whether the iPhone analytics feature was switched on or off, said the complaint. The Mysk researchers also found the App store appeared to harvest information about everything device owners do in real time, including which apps they search for, what ads they view and for how long the apps were viewed and how they were found, it said.

Apple “owed a duty” to its customers to “ensure that the personal information it was given and which it gathered from customers” remained confidential and secure, and that it wasn’t used for “a profit purpose when consumers explicitly asked that the information not be used,” said the complaint. The failure to ensure the “integrity and privacy” of consumers’ personal information “is highly offensive to a reasonable person because Apple said it would not track such information and then tracked it anyway,” it said. Apple didn’t comment.