A new day, a new process for the Cupertino giant that this time is summoned to court together with 2 other companies developing applications for iDevices. Now Apple is not being sued because of location logging, but because of the user identification system based on UDIDs. Apple is accused of providing advertising companies with information about users, their habits and the places where they surf the Internet. The plaintiffs accuse the Apple company of "violating" their right to privacy by providing data that allows advertisers to identify them.
The difference between the two cases involving smartphone apps and traditional web cookies is that smartphones have a Unique Device ID (UDID) that advertisers can reliably associate with a given user, and which may be linked with location data collected as the user carries the device.
The suit notes that "Apple certainly understands the significance of its UDID and users' privacy, as, internally Apple claims that it treats UDID information as 'personally identifiable information' because, if combined with other information, it can be used to personally identify a user."
Apple was summoned to court along with Pandora and Backflip Studios, which allegedly collected data about users and provided it to advertising companies. In the lawsuit, Apple is accused of not offering users a method to block the possibility of applications transmitting data regarding the terminal's UDID to other people. Apple is not at the first trial of this kind and certainly not at the last, considering that it has not and will not fix the problem with UDIDs.
