Apple Hit With Location Services Class Action Suit ⇥ pando.com

Paul Carr of Pando Daily, quoting from Chen Ma’s suit:

…Plaintiff alleges that while using her iPhones, including her current iPone [sic] 5S, she was not given notice that her daily whereabouts would be tracked, recorded, and transmitted to Apple database to be stored for future reference. She was not asked for and thus has not given her consent, approval and permission nor was she even made aware that her detailed daily whereabouts would be tracked, recorded and transmitted to Apple database.

Apple, in the Terms and Conditions that Ma agreed to when setting up her iPhone:

By enabling Location Services on your iPhone, you agree and consent to the transmission, collection, maintenance, processing, and use of your location data and location search queries by Apple and its partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based and road traffic-based products and services.

It’s not going to be this cut and dry — these things never are — but this seems so frivolous to me. This is the most interesting part of this suit:

According to belief and information, Plaintiff further alleges that Apple has released and disclosed the above described private information of iPhone users to third parties, including but not limited to US government who, according to information, has made more than 1,000 information requests to Apple.

Isn’t this legal effort better directed towards the NSA who issued those information demands? National Security Letters are essentially orders, not mere requests.