A legal firm representing more than 26,600 South Korean iPhone owners has filed a class-action suit against Apple for violating their privacy rights. The suit filed in Changwon District Court by the law firm Miraelaw on Wednesday asks the court to award damages of 27 billion won (US$26 million).
Though this is little more than spare change for Apple, which is currently sitting on cash reserves of more than $75 billion, losing the suit could embolden others to file similar lawsuits in other countries. The problem for Apple is that the Changwon court awarded a single plaintiff one million won in July after a similar privacy lawsuit was filed by Miraelaw.
"It is clearly illegal for Apple to indiscriminately collect location data 
on iPhone users without consent," Miraelaw lawyer Lee Jae-choul told the Korea Times on Wednesday. "To protect consumers' rights, we filed a class-action lawsuit against information-technology giant Apple."
Fixing the Problem
Apple said iPhones were storing personal-location information for up to a year due to a software glitch. Last April, the design flaw raised the ire of privacy advocates in the United States, since the file in which location information was stored was both unencrypted and relatively simple for an unauthorized person to access.
"Anyone who finds a lost or stolen iPhone or iPad or who has access to any computer used to sync one of these devices could easily download and map out a customer 's precise movements for months at a time, [including] the businesses he frequents, the doctors he visits, the schools his children attend, and the trips he has taken over the past months or even a year," noted Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) in an April letter to Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
Responding to the letter, Apple said it doesn't track the locations of iPhone users and the data collected is used to maintain a database of the Wi-Fi hot spots and cell towers around each iPhone, which helps users receive location information more quickly and more accurately than GPS technology used on its own. Apple subsequently addressed the concerns by pushing out an iOS update with changes to the location storage .
A Slap on the Wrist
Among other things, Apple's iOS upgrade reduced the size of the location cache, which is deleted whenever the user turns off the iPhone's location service used by maps, geo-tagged photos, and other location-based apps. Additionally, the location data is encrypted and stored for no longer than seven days.
Still, earlier this month the Korea Communications Commission fined Apple for violating the nation's location-information laws. Though the slap on the wrist only amounted to three million won (US$2,800), the judgment may embolden other regulatory bodies to impose fines.
Meanwhile, Miraelaw is hoping more Korean iPhone owners will join the class-action suit before the end of this month. According to the Korea Times, Apple has sold more than three million iPhones in South Korea, which means less than one percent of the device users are currently represented in the suit.
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