Nearly 27,000 iPhone users in South Korea have filed a class-action lawsuit against Apple over the phone’s indiscriminate collecting of users’ location information, demanding the California-based firm pay them 1 million won ($930) each in compensation for violating their privacy, a law firm said Wednesday. Miraelaw, based in Changwon, lodged the suit with the Changwon District Court against both Apple Korea and Apple headquarters in California through the Supreme Court’s electronic litigation portal (ecfs.scourt.go.kr) on their behalf. A total of 26,691 iPhone users registered with the law firm to join a suit against Apple, paying 16,900 won each in litigation fees for which they will receive 1 million won each if they win the case.
The unprecedented move came after Changwon District Court ruled in early July that Apple pay 1 million won for privacy infringement caused by the location-tracking function to Kim Hyeong-seok, a lawyer with Miraelaw. This was the first local case where a smartphone user was awarded compensation for Apple’s location data collection. The hype surrounding the class action against the world’s largest tech firm has attracted a great deal of attention from iPhone users in Korea and abroad. The number of iPhone users joining the suit turned out to be far fewer than the firm initially expected as the odds of winning a legal battle against the world’s largest IT company have increasingly become slim. The law firm had expected at least 100,000 users to join the suit.