On April 22 two plaintiffs, Vikram Ajjampur, an iPhone user in Florida, and William Devito, an iPad user in New York, sued Apple Inc. in federal court in Tampa to block alleged location tracking in iPhone and iPad products running Apple’s iOS operating system.

The plaintiffs are seeking removal of tracking capabilities in the next release of iOS and class-action status, which if granted, would involve one-third to one-half of the 60 million iPhone users in the United States. The lawsuit also seeks unspecified punitive damages for alleged violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, state laws comparable to the Federal Trade Commission Act, and "common law rights in uniform ways" of the plaintiffs and class members.

The lawsuit is based on research released on April 20 by Alasdair Allan, senior research fellow in astronomy at the University of Exeter, and writer Pete Warden, reporting that the iPhone, the 3G iPad, and backups on users’ computers contain detailed information tracking the users’ location, including longitude, latitude, and time stamps. The information is stored in an unencrypted file called “consolidated.db.”

"Users of Apple's iPhones and iPads, including Plaintiffs, were unaware of Apple's tracking their locations and did not consent to such tracking," the suit claims. "Apple collects the location information covertly, surreptitiously and in violations of law." "If Apple wanted to track the whereabouts of each of its products' users, it should have obtained specific, particularized informed consent such that Apple consumers across America would not have been shocked and alarmed to learn of Apple's practices in recent days."

In parallel with the lawsuit, lawmakers from the United States and regulators from France, Italy, and South Korea are also investigating Apple, Google, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Research In Motion, and Nokia for alleged location tracking embedded in smartphones.

Apple and Google have both said previously that users can prevent the data collection by turning off location-based services, though doing so limits location-based functionality, such as maps. However, a Wall Street Journal investigation found that turning off location services doesn't disable the storage, at least not on the iPhone 4 it used to run tests.

Apple Responds to Accusations

On April 27 Apple responded by posting an “Apple Q&A on Location Data” explaining the location tracking in further detail. Important points include:

• The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location – some of which may be located more than one hundred miles from your iPhone – to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested (for applications requiring location data to function, such as GPS).
• Any Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data sent from your iPhone to Apple is in an anonymous and in encrypted form. Apple cannot identify the source of this data.
• As of April 27, there is nothing you can do to stop Apple from tracking your WiFi/cellular tower information. Turning off Location Services will not disable the recording of this data.
• Apple will release a free iOS software update that: reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone; ceases backing up this cache, and deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off. In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone.

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1. Apple Tracks iPhone Users, Twenty-Four Hours a Day
2. Privacy, TV Ads, and Who’s Tracking Your Personally Identifying Information
3. Do Not Track Me! Stop Online Ad Tracking