An iPhone customer has filed a lawsuit against AT&T, claiming that the telecom company is overcharging him for data services. Filed by Patrick Hendricks in the Northern District of California, the lawsuit seeks class-action status, alleging that AT&T is committing unlawful and fraudulent business practices by regularly overbilling customers for data transactions. “AT&T’s billing system for …
An iPhone customer has filed a lawsuit against AT&T, claiming that the telecom company is overcharging him for data services. Filed by Patrick Hendricks in the Northern District of California, the lawsuit seeks class-action status, alleging that AT&T is committing unlawful and fraudulent business practices by regularly overbilling customers for data transactions. “AT&T’s billing system for …
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iPhone Customer Sues AT&T Over ‘Rigged’ Data Charges
Federal Lawsuit Filed Over Apple’s Location Tracking in iOS
Monday April 25, 2011 02:32 PM EST; Category: iPhone
Written by Eric Slivka
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Courthouse News Service reports that AT&T has been hit with a new class action lawsuit alleging that the carrier is overbilling its customers for data transferred through its networks to iOS devices such as the iPhone and iPad. According to the suit, AT&T is overstating the amount of data used for each transaction, leading some users to exceed their data plan limits and incur extra charges.
This one claims that “AT&T’s bills systematically overstate the amount of data used on each data transaction involving an iPhone or iPad account,” and bills customers for data transactions even if they disable their phones and leave them untouched – as the plaintiff’s experts did.
The class says AT&T’s billing system “is like a rigged gas tank that charges pump that charges for a full gallon when it pumps only nine-tenths of a gallon into your car’s tank.”
The filing describes how a consulting firm hired by the plaintiff’s attorneys conducted a two-month study that found AT&T overstating data usage by 7-14%, with some transactions coming in at as much 300% above the actual amount of data transferred.
The complaint goes on to detail data transactions being recorded even when no data usage is being initiated by the customer, as determined by the company purchasing an iPhone and letting it sit with push notifications and location services disabled and with no applications open or other data-transferrring tasks enabled.
This was discovered by the same independent consulting firm, which purchased an iPhone from an AT&T store, immediately disabled all push notifications and location services, confirmed that no email account was configured on the phone, closed all applications, and let the phone sit untouched for 10 days. During this 10-day period, AT&T billed the test account for 35 data transactions totaling 2,292 KB of usage. This is like the rigged gas pump charging you when you never even pulled your car into the station.”
PC World notes that the greater-than-expected data usage may in some cases be related to Apple’s multitasking features deployed in iOS 4 that allow certain processes of applications to continue running in the background even after the applications themselves have been suspended by the user switching to a different application.
Many of those apps may be actively communicating and downloading data in the background. So, perhaps the data issues that users are seeing, and that AT&T is being accused of systematically overcharging for, are–at least in part–a function of the “virtues” of adding multitasking to iOS. I can tell you this: once we realized all of these apps were running and started manually shutting down all of the multitasking apps, my data usage issues went away.
While it is true that certain applications running in the background can utilize data, that explanation does not appear to account for the circumstances cited in the lawsuit, which involve alleged overstatement of data used in individual transactions and phantom data usage by devices configured not to use data services.
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LA Weekly reports (via The Next Web) that a class action lawsuit has been filed against Apple over the iPhone 4 and its claimed propensity for breakage. The lawsuit feeds off the “Glassgate” publicity that has seen the iPhone 4 judged to be more accident-prone than other smartphones due to Apple’s use of glass on both the front and back of the device.
Apparently fed up and pissed off, California resident Donald LeBuhn filed a class action lawsuit earlier this week in L.A. County against Apple, claiming the company knows about the design flaw and refuses to warn consumers that “normal” use leads essentially to a broken phone.
According to his lawsuit, first reported by Courthouse News Service, LeBuhn threw down $252 in September for a new iPhone 4, but three weeks later the glass broke when his daughter accidentally dropped it approximately three feet to the ground while sending a text message.
He previously owned a 3GS version of the iPhone and claims the glass did not break when accidentally dropped from similar heights.
In his filing, LeBuhn cites Apple marketing materials for the iPhone 4, which claim that the “ultradurable” glass used in the iPhone 4 is “20 times stiffer and 30 times harder than plastic”. According to LeBuhn, these claims are misleading at best, and his suit seeks full refunds for customers covered by the class action suit and reimbursement for any repairs made.
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Bloomberg reports that Apple and a number of App Store developers have been sued over the sharing of personal information with advertisers working through apps installed on the iPhone and iPad.
The complaint, which seeks class action, or group, status, was filed on Dec. 23 in federal court in San Jose, California. The suit claims Cupertino, California-based Apple’s iPhones and iPads are encoded with identifying devices that allow advertising networks to track what applications users download, how frequently they’re used and for how long.
“Some apps are also selling additional information to ad networks, including users’ location, age, gender, income, ethnicity, sexual orientation and political views,” according to the suit.
Along with Apple, developers behind such apps as Pandora Radio, Paper Toss, The Weather Channel, and Dictionary.com have also been targeted with the suit.
In particular, the companies are accused of sharing Unique Device Identifiers (UDIDs) for users’ devices. As suggested by their name, these UDIDs are unique to each device, can not be changed, and transmission of them back to Apple or developers can not be blocked by users.
For its part, Apple notes that it screens all App Store applications to make sure that personal information is not transmitted from users’ devices without their express permission, although such information may be able to be passed along to ad networks.
It is unclear whether the lawsuit is targeting a legitimate privacy issue or if it’s simply objecting to the typical non-identifiable demographic information used by advertisers in targeting their content. While the UDID does not specifically identify any given user, tying any anonymized personal data to that fixed identifier is viewed as a risk by some privacy advocates.
An investigation by The Wall Street Journal published earlier this month hyped the ability of iPhone and Android applications to transmit such personal data, and it is possible that the new lawsuit was inspired by that report.
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Nokia and Apple, which have been involved in a patent dispute for over a year that has seen both parties file lawsuits and U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) complaints against each other, are finally headed to a courtroom after ITC staff issued a memo supporting Nokia in its defense against Apple’s claims, Bloomberg reports.
“The evidence will not establish a violation” of Apple patent rights, the staff, which acts on behalf of the public as a third party in the case, said in a pre-hearing memo released yesterday. Apple is asking the ITC to block imports of Nokia phones into the U.S., claiming they are infringing four patents.
In their examination of the case, ITC staff determined that certain aspects of Apple’s patents cited in the lawsuit should be found invalid, while other patents have not been infringed by Nokia’s devices.
A decision from ITC Administrative Law Judge Charles Bullock is due in February, and while he is not required to follow the advice of ITC staff, their findings will clearly carry significant weight in the case.
The ITC has yet to take a position in Nokia’s suit against Apple, which is scheduled to go to trial at the end of this month.
Related federal court cases covering the patent dispute have been on hold since March of this year pending the outcome of these ITC lawsuits.
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Late Friday, in a seemingly retaliatory move, Apple filed suit against Motorola over the potential infringement of six Apple patents covering Multi-touch technology. The legal documents uncovered by PatentlyApple reveal that the lawsuit encompasses the following Apple patents:
- Ellipse Fitting for Multi-Touch Surfaces
- Multipoint Touchscreen
- Object-Oriented System Locator System
- Touch Screen Device, Method, and Graphical User Interface for Determining Commands by Applying Heuristics
- Method and Apparatus for Displaying and Accessing Control and Status Information in a Computer System
- Support for Custom User-Interaction Elements in a Graphical, Event-Driven Computer System
The offending Motorola devices include the Droid, Droid 2, Droid X, Cliq, Cliq XT, BackFlip, Devour A555, Devour i1, and Charm. The mobile industry has been littered with lawsuits between the major players. Apple specifically is involved in lawsuits with Nokia, HTC, Kodak, Elan and now Motorola. Motorola is also being sued by Microsoft over a number of their mobile patents that may be used in Motorola’s Android phones.
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TechCrunch reports that Apple has settled a lawsuit brought by Sharing Sound, LLC over infringement of a patent essentially describing web-based distribution of digital music. The lawsuit, filed in May, targeted Apple, Microsoft, Napster, Rhapsody, and other companies, with Amazon, Netflix, and additional companies included in a similar suit filed around the same time.
The patent being contested – U.S. Patent Number 6,247,130, titled “Distribution of musical products by a website vendor over the Internet” – would essentially prevent all these companies from using any type of online store environment which allows them to provide song previews, a shopping cart or even a music player.
According to the report, most of the companies targeted in the lawsuits have already moved to settle their disputes, with Apple now joining the list as it seeks to avoid a court battle.
The application for the patent cited in the lawsuit was filed January 2000 and was based on a provisional patent application filed in January 1999. The inventor associated with the patent, Bernhard Fritsch, founded a short-lived digital music service known as MCY.com that launched in early 1999.
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The Wall Street Journal reports that Interval Licensing, a patent licensing firm run by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and designed to protect the intellectual property of Allen’s former technology incubator company Interval Research Corporation, has filed suit against Apple and ten other companies over several patents related to e-commerce and Web search technologies.
Mr. Allen, 57, Friday through his firm Interval Licensing LLC filed suit in federal court in Seattle asserting the companies are using technology from his laboratory. Named in the suit, along with Apple and Google, are AOL Inc., eBay Inc., Facebook Inc., Netflix Inc., Office Depot Inc., OfficeMax Inc., Staples Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Google’s YouTube subsidiary.
The suit doesn’t name Microsoft, Amazon.com Inc. or other technology firms in Seattle where Mr. Allen is based. The suit doesn’t estimate a damage amount.
According to a press release issued by Interval Licensing, four patents are at stake in the lawsuit:
- United States Patent No. 6,263,507 issued for an invention entitled “Browser for Use in Navigating a Body of Information, With Particular Application to Browsing Information Represented By Audiovisual Data.”
- United States Patent No. 6,034,652 issued for an invention entitled “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device.”
- United States Patent No. 6,788,314 issued for an invention entitled “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device.”
- United States Patent No. 6,757,682 issued for an invention entitled “Alerting Users to Items of Current Interest.”
The press release claims that the technologies are “fundamental” to the operation of leading e-commerce and search companies and the firm is merely looking to protect its own investments in innovation. According to The Wall Street Journal, the lawsuit marks a major shift for Allen in his increasingly aggressive efforts to protect the intellectual property developed at Interval Research during the 1990s.
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