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27,000 South Koreans Sue Apple
jfruhlinger writes "You may have already forgotten the iPhone location-tracking furor, but 27,000 South Koreans haven't! They (or the lawyers recruiting them) have launched a class action suit against Apple due to the 'emotional distress' suffered. The litigants are seeking around $1,000 apiece in damages. From the article: 'Apple has faced complaints and criticisms since it said in April that its iPhones were storing locations of nearby cellphone towers and Wi-Fi hot spots for up to a year. Such data can be used to create a rough map of the device owner's movements.'"
While I doubt it really cost all 27k of them any emotional distress, it could possibly cause dissidents in other countries some distress. Think activists in China. Although china already has complete control behind the great firewall of china.
I don't think apple will be able to afford this.
Isn't it weird that Korea being home to Samsung and LG is where this lawsuit is happening?
Take that, apple.
Emotional distress? Give me a break. This is just a bunch of ambulance chasers trying to cash in on what has already been dismissed as a non-issue. Yes, the iPhone tracks the locations and strengths of cellular towers.
With more to come. Google, beware. I see the spygles in front of my house, logging my location, tracking me. Go get screwed.
If their iPhones were tracking them then they were probably just holding them wrong.
Can't play Starcraft 2 on this. MONEY!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Apple says... Here's USD 30M and keep the change!
My location is patented and copyright material.
These are worthless, gutless subhumans living under disgusting dictatorship.
Apple should buy the peninsula and drive them all into the sea.
Then progress northwards into China and force them all into slave labour building iPod Shuffles for the Master Race.
I've come to the belated realization that iPhones and (for the most part) Android phones are hardly more than devices for tracking your every move, thought, and desire for the purpose of selling stuff to you.
It's too bad you got taken in by the rows of shiny icons.
Also, in South Korea, only old people use iPhones.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Ahh eat your own crap apple... You seriously think after suing suing suing no ones going to sue you.... ? Of course its not like you cant afford it... Now all we need is someone to sue you for a large sum of your bank account.
It is pretty impressive how Apple was able to wriggle out of that one. Nope, your phone "isn't tracking you," it's just a cache of cell towers used to speed GPS.
OK, fine. Then why does their privacy policy still allow Apple to collect your location data?
Oh, because that's for sending you local ads if you use an app that uses iAd, and for building Apple's database of Wi-Fi access points and GPS coordinates to allow iDevices without GPS to generate a location. (To provide local ads for apps that use iAd. Also for the user's benefit on occasion.)
But apparently that's OK, because we poor peons no longer have access to the location data Apple's recording, which includes a unique identifier so that they can track iDevices.
No problem at all with that, apparently.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I bet North Koreans ate all their dogs already.
Dog is yummy.
Whenever one visits Korea in the summer, it is pretty much obligatory to have a nice dog soup with friends and a few bottles of soju.
legal zerg rush
Does the meat in the dog soup smell like a wet dog?
S. Korea is less than 1/4 the size of California.
It's about the same size as Kentucky.
Yes, I'm quite sure all Koreans (North and South!) believe that, and that those who do believe it are instantly incapable of having a valid opinion about anything.
As long as the phone companies are keeping this information---and they are---I want to be able to access it myself. This whole kerfluffle has made location tracking much *less* transparent.
They also believe that artistically arranged chunks of charcoal will absorb electromagnetic radiation.
But then again, Americans believe in alien abductions.
By that logic, the United States has no valid opinion on anything because large portions of the population believe in Sky Wizards. Both fan death and "god" are baseless, irrational and superstitious. What makes your world view more valid than theirs?
Well it is true that all S Korean fans have a timer on them so that you won't accidently leave it on all night and die.
And it is true that "death by fan suffocation" is a legitimate cause of death for S. Korean death certificates.
In Soviet North Koren, dog eat people lying dead (we hope dead) in street! Also see happening on Inchon isle lands.
Fragile enough that personal privacy 'injures you' to the extent you need money? Don't buy it.
In the US, it doesn't matter who knows where you are, if you're not doing anything wrong, they can't touch you.
Personally, I bought it, so they can know where I am at any point in time.
Any time they need a mad-fu-beat-down, they can come get it.
Reading the wikipedia article you actually link will tell you they do not eat THEIR dog, but some dogs that are raised in order to be eaten. That's no different from eating rabbit (that are considered both pets and food in different country and sometimes in the same countries) or horses.
What is the problem of eating animals that are considered pets by others? If I take a cow as my pet, will you stop eating cows ? Obviously not. What animals are considered food or pets depend entirely on culture. Biologically speaking, we can eat pretty much anything that is biologically considered alive (well, some would make us damn sick...)
Besides, eating dog is not so common in South Korea.
Finally, I eat snails. Spiders are eaten in some parts of africa. Cinamon rolls are eaten in america. Everybody eats some food that is considered weird in some other part of the world.
Let's just accept it and move on...
The rest of us are too busy entering all of our personal information into the advertising giant Facebook and Google+, to care about our privacy rights.
I just used the logs in an old backup to catch my girlfriend in a lie related to some cheating she was doing last year.
That make-the-other-side-look-bad thing that you're doing doesn't work when you're so obvious about it.
Actually, I have no problem with that at all. Why? Because I don't give a flying fuck if Apple is tracking me or not and if I did, I could throw out my iphone (well, recycle it). Don't like some policy of Apple's? Don't use Apple products!!! But quit calling be a peon just because I don't wear a tinfoil hat like you. Some of us have a firm grasp on reality and have realized that with so many millions of iphone users, there simply isn't anyone who cares where you, a lone user out of millions, are at any particular moment.
Because one can be disproven, and the other can't? Don't get me wrong, I'm an atheist, but fan death and god are hardly in the same category.
Second section, from cited wikipee:
Current situation
The primary breed raised in dog farms for meat consumption, the Nureongi (ëëì), or Hwangu (í(TM)©ê; éfç--)
Sort of like UK cattle industry, only with Fido.
Shhhh! I'm hunting wabbit-hund. Don't twell nowody!
Do I have to explain this in small words?
I don't care if you don't care about being tracked or not. My comment is simply that people were outraged at being "tracked by Apple" and Apple's solution was literally to hide the tracking data from end users, but continue to track them.
You're still being tracked by Apple. But you can't easily see it any more.
Which apparently was enough for people to stop caring, even though they were completely outraged that Apple might be tracking them just days before.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Actually, this is not true. It's quite easy to walk into large discount stores (e.g., Emart, Home Plus, etc.) and purchase fans without timers. However, it is true belief in fan death is almost universal here. I enjoy teasing my Korean friends about it.
Source: I am an expat in South Korea.
Eat shit, you atheist CUNT.
OK, sure, your brain is fogged over from lack of sleep or too much.
I live in Japan, which shares a lot of cultural artifacts with Korea. Also shares a similar climate and similar crowding.
There was a similar tradition in Japan about leaving the fan on all night here some thirty years ago, although what I remember had mostly to do with catching a cold from it, if you took the time to really understand what the people were saying.
The timer is there for several reasons, the primary one being that people who don't want the fun running all night don't want to have to set an alarm clock so they can shut it off.
Why should they want the fan to not run all night?
Saving electricity is one good reason.
Not wanting to dry the sinuses out is another.
Messing with the body temperature while the body is partially inactive is another.
Not so much now, but electrical insulation 60 years ago was not reliable, and fans left running all night were known to sometimes cause house fires. (And when your neighbor's house is as close as it tends to be in Japan and Korea, a house fire is a community problem, not just an individual problem.)
Translation issues in some cases did cause foreigners whose Japanese skills didn't match their imagination to misinterpret the reasons stated. Not saying that there weren't any strange superstitions involved. There was some of that, too. But there were translation problems as well and I have heard some really strange things from time to time that I've now traced to (mostly) mistranslation.
The sensations felt when you sleep under a fan too long, especially a steady, non-oscillating fan, can be remarkably like what the wikipedia article describes.
The sinuses drying can feel suffocating. The motion of the air, also, can interrupt the breathing rhythm. Both of these things can be a contributing factor in death for elderly or invalid people.
A vent fan pushing kitchen air outside can cause issues with air pressure inside, and, again, can aggravate other issues and become a partial cause of death. Depends on the construction of the building and the health of the occupants, of course.
And the body does partially lose its ability to regulate its temperature during sleep. A constant breeze can screw up temperature regulation as well, and the combination can give a person serious chills on a hot day. (I've felt those chills.) Again, this can combine with other problems and cause death.
So, yeah, the mass media is trying to sell advertisements with alarmist reporting, taking a core of reality and stretching it beyond all belief.
But I'm going to assume that the people who really believe the weird theories are among the fringe, which every country has its share of. Oh, and the foreigners whose Korean language skills don't help them distinguish between primary and contributing causes in reports.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
That's not the primary reason for the timer, and it doesn't take a lot of thinking to realize the real reason for the timer.
I haven't seen Korean death certificates, but I'm going to assume, first, that the "death by fan suffocation" is going to be read as a final straw contributing factor in an invalid or elderly person. Also, I'm going to guess that "suffocation", when/if that is the actual term used, is going to be intended as a reference to all the ways that fans can aggravate health issues in people who are not healthy: dry sinus, body temperature, breathing rhythm, etc.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Yeah. I'll never understand how, between the widespread vaccine/climate change/evolution/GMO food denialism, homeopathy and other alternative medicine 'nonsense', nuclear myths, general chemophobia, and all the other forms of scientific illiteracy in the US (and more significantly Europe) why it is always religious stuff that people hit on. I think a lot of it has more to do with atheism than science....like pretty much everything else nowadays, science takes the backseat.
What god gets you to respond like that? Sounds like a hateful asshole that I want absolutely nothing to do with...
Like Apple? "Meh"
Don't like other people knowing where you are? Don't use a phone of any sort.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Against the Jobs reality distortion field effect.
Call Darth Vader or more likely Dick Chaney.
++//--
instead of suing them, you should stop buying their products if they cause you emotional stress and/or if you are concerned about your privacy.
nobody is forcing you to buy these products. so simply stop it already.
Fair play I say!
The plaintiffs are claiming that the location-tracking feature on the iPhone has inflicted emotional distress on the device owners.
mere emotional distress may not be enough if they ever find out how much their carrier knows, or who they share it with
He's the same dude that deliver 80% of the racist "jokes" in here. That should be a pretty cool God, half Hitler half redneck AND HALF CATHOLIC!!!1 trolololo.
He's mostly on Apple and foreign news stories, not that hard to pattern. He also keeps track of coomment numbers so..
I'll mathcatch you racist fucker, and I'm going to ADL you ass into oblivion.
We're not trying to threaten your lifestyle by pointing out that some people, at some times in their lives, really don't handle fans well.
Fans can be lifesavers at other times and/or for other people.
And people have been known to choke on spaghetti. We don't stop eating it, but you may need to chop it up into bite-size pieces for elderly folks and for people who for one reason or another don't have full control over the muscles in their throat.
Lots of variety in this world.
And things that at first sound strange about other cultures can be understood with a little effort.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Don't like people calling you out as the lying moron you rightfully fear yourself to be? Don't make clumsy attempts to disguise false dichotomies as common sense.
Explain the particular lie I told.
Then go back to Netnews where trolls such as yourself can find kindred spirits to share their social dysfunctions with.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.