Allyson Bird reports on yet another lawsuit stemming from a Wall Street Journal article:
Google’s Android smartphones might know more about the people who use them than their friends and family.
Not only do the cell phones and their applications track customers’ physical locations, but they store and transmit everything from sexual orientation to income, according to a federal class-action lawsuit filed by a Charleston attorney. The lawsuit alleges that Google and some smartphone apps then sell that information to advertising companies.
[…]
Mayer, who filed his lawsuit in Florida, said that about 10 cases cropped up around the country in the wake of the news story and that all of those filings likely will be consolidated into a single case in California. Given that Android sold 67 million phones worldwide in 2010, the case could include tens of millions of customers, according to the lawsuit.
Mayer makes a case against Android’s owner Google, Internet radio provider and Android app maker Pandora, and advertising companies AdMob and Traffic Marketplace. Google engineers the operating systems for many smart phone models and transmits information from the phones back to its databases, according to the lawsuit.
Read more in the Post and Courier.