Location, location, location...can certainly get a company into hot water these days.
Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC has been hit with a lawsuit by customers who claim the company tracks and shares too much detail when it gathers location information using a weather app integrated into its phones. The plaintiffs are seeking class-action status for their suit.
The lawsuit (PDF, 23 pages), filed in a Seattle federal court last week, claims that HTC uses the AccuWeather app to track customers’ exact geographic location and shares that information with advertisers who want to target users with location-specifc ads.
Both HTC, which has its U.S. headquarters in Bellevue, and Pennsylvania-based AccuWeather are named in the suit. The plaintiffs maintain that the two companies collect more information than needed to provide customers with relevant weather information.
The suit says HTC collects "fine" location points, using GPS data to identify the exact location of a particular user, rather than "coarse" location data, which is based on nearby cell towers. This is "unnecessarily precise" for providing weather forecasts, say the plaintiffs.
AccuWeather is integrated into the HTC EVO 3D and 4G phones and cannot be uninstalled or “reasonably disabled,” according to the plaintiffs. The suit also claims that HTC fails to encrypt customer location data.
The plaintiffs are seeking an injunction, as well as compensation for all owners of EVO 3D and 4G smartphones. They say the phones are "unreasonably defective" and that they would not have purchased them had they known of the defects.
The lawsuit taps into growing concern over the ways tech companies use and handle data collected via customers' mobile phones. In this mobile era, location-specific data can be a gold mine for advertisers looking to target shoppers with highly relevant ads. However, as the number of location-based apps and services such as Google maps and Yelp continue to grow, so do concerns over customers' privacy.
HTC is not the only company to face troubles related to tracking customers' locations. Microsoft was sued in September by Windows Phone users who claimed they were tracked by the company, even after they had opted out of location tracking.
In May, Apple and Google addressed privacy concerns in a Congressional hearing after a former Apple software engineer said that Apple’s smartphone software collects and sends location information and other unencrypted user data.
Apple later fixed its location-tracking "bug" and said its most recent iOS update is even more secure as it encrypts an iPhone's location cache.
