Apple's Korean arm of the company paid Kim Hyung-suk, an iPhone user and a lawyer to boot, 1 million won or the equivalent of $946 to settle a suit against Apple for collecting location data without consent.
This is the first payout by Apple over the complaints and the fact Apple was willing to shell out some money resulted in the preparation of a class action lawsuit against Apple for the unauthorized collection of location data by Hyung-suk's law firm, Mirae Law.
Mirae Law already has a website up where affected iPhone users can sign up to be a part of the class action suit against Apple. The website (www.sueapple.co.kr) crashed due to heavy traffic shortly after going live.
While $946 may not seem like a whole lot of cash, when Apple is forced to pay that amount out to thousands and thousands of people it can quickly add up. A number of class action suits had already been filed in the U.S. before this ruling. I'm pretty sure the U.S. courts don't use international rulings as precedent, but it will be interesting to see how this ruling in the Korean courts affects similar cases here in the U.S.
Source: Reuters
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