Apple asks California court to dismiss iPhone tracking lawsuit

Judge Lucy Koh was presiding over lawyers from Apple again, but not because of the ongoing drama with Samsung.

You may recall the news of iOS tracking your every move, and storing, unencrypted, up to a year’s worth of data. That data was also shared on the computer of users who synchronized with iTunes. Naturally, a number of lawsuits have been filed against Apple.

Apple asked the court to dismiss the case on the basis that no harm was caused and that the plaintiffs cannot prove the company gave users data to third parties. Moreover, Apple is refusing to handover documents relevant to proving that assertion one way or the other because it claims that would equate to an attempt to discover harm versus determining if harm was actually caused.

Apple has positioned the case as a matter of information storage versus one of privacy invasion. The company also wants the terms of the case reclassified as a “Caching Query Bug” on the assertion that Apple’s storage of user data was accidental.

Several charges were dismissed last summer, but two charges are still pending for violations of the Consumer Legal Remedies Act and Unfair Competition Law, the latter of which is related to allegations that iPhones were deceptively sold with “Location Services” switches that could not be turned off. The former charge is based on the assertion that Apple did not protect user data.

Apples explanations at the time were not of much comfort for those who were alarmed by this discovery in 2011. Since then, updates to iOS have apparently addressed the amount and type of data that is gathered, as well as amount of time that data is stored.

source: The Register