South Korea has reportedly fined Apple Inc’s local operation in the country a sum of ₩3Million for an accuse of collecting the user location information from all iPhone users in the country. This is the newest lawsuit taken to Apple since it has been revealed in the United States that iPhones were programmed to store the locations of surrounding cell phone towers and WiFi hotspots in its memory for up to 365 days.
From the data stored by the iPhones, Apple is capable to track the movements of the device owners which will be dangerous if the data is leaked or hacked into by black hat hackers and in turn, sell the data to those who are interested in it. Even if Apple can prove that the data is impossible to be leaked or hacked into, Apple has already violates the law where the privacy of the owner of the iPhones are breached. Even though the fine amount is ridiculously small, which is around US$7500 compared to the US7.31billion that the company made in three months, this move by the the Korea Communications Commission (KCC) might influence regulators from other places in the world.
Apple’s local representatives have spoken to the media and rectified that Apple did not track and store the location of the iPhones they manufactured. Apple also mentioned that they have never done the procedure of storing the user location’s data and they never planned to save the data into their database. However, the company did said that Apple record the WiFi hotspots and cell towers location for the sake of improving their customer service and most iPhone users also know that
the location tracking can be turned off easily in the settings. Apple also said that there is also a bug which is harmless to the device owners that keep the data of the owner’s whereabouts even when the Location Services feature has been disabled which is currently under review by the company’s workers.
For the meantime, KCC demands Apple to ensure that data about user’s location on iPhones to be stored in an encryption to prevent hackers to easily take the data for illegal usage. Google Inc has also been demanded the same thing after the company stated that smartphones using Android operating system will also stores GPS data even though it is for a short time. This case is the latest legal problem in South Korea affecting this electronic devices conglomerate where a similar lawsuit happened in May favouring the Korean lawyers and then awarded US$2500 for damages.