Both companies faced congressional hearings last year on privacy issues, which are likely to remain on lawmakers and regulators’ minds both nationally and in California. The lawsuit comes as companies, most notably Facebook and Google, are increasingly under fire for how they use people’s personal data. He said he learned about the sale of the private data from an article in the New York Times. While disclosures may be included in the privacy policy, state law says “fine print alone can’t make good what otherwise has been made obscure”, Feuer said.
It does not say how the company benefits from the information. Users who download the free app are asked whether to allow access to their location to “get personalized local weather data, alerts and forecasts”. Marketed as the “world’s most downloaded weather app”, the Weather Channel app claims approximately 45 million users a month, the lawsuit said. Any court decision would only apply to California. The lawsuit seeks to stop the company from the practice it calls “unfair and fraudulent” and seeks penalties of up to $2,500 for each violation. “If you want to sacrifice to that company that information, you sure ought to be doing it with clear advanced notice of what’s at stake.”Ī spokesman for IBM, which owns the app, said it had always been clear about the use of location data collected from users and will vigorously defend its “fully appropriate” disclosures.įeuer said the app’s operators, TWC Product and Technology LLC, sold data to at least a dozen websites for targeted ads and to hedge funds that used the information to analyze consumer behavior. “Think how Orwellian it feels to live in a world where a private company is tracking potentially every place you go, every minute of every day,” Feuer said.
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