Mike Peterson
Apple has lost a bid to move to private arbitration a consumer privacy lawsuit related to its iMessage platform, and must now face the complaint in open court.
U.S. District Judge Lorna G. Schofield on Tuesday rejected an argument from Apple and T-Mobile that provisions in the carrier's terms and conditions require consumer disputes to go into private arbitration, Bloomberg reports. T-Mobile is the co-defendant in the lawsuit, Ohanian v. Apple Inc.
The complaint itself, initially lodged U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in 2020, alleges that an iPhone bug and the fact that T-Mobile recycled phone numbers created a breach of consumer privacy.
That iPhone bug affected iMessage and FaceTime, and caused communications intended for one smartphone user to be routed to another. The underlying cause of the flaw was related to how Apple's software and backend handled device identifiers.
At the time of the bug's discovery, reports indicated that stolen iPhone devices were receiving communications intended for the original owner, despite mechanisms like resetting an Apple ID or remotely wiping a handset. According to the complaint, the bug and T-Mobile's phone number recycling policy breached both companies' promise that iMessage and FaceTime were secure.
Companies typically prefer to handle cases such as these in private arbitration since it's quicker, rulings are final with only limited rights to appeal, and they have a say in the selection of judges.
Judge Schofield said she would make a final ruling on one of the plaintiff's claims against T-Mobile about his agreement to arbitrate with the carrier. She, however, rejected Apple's request to move a different consumer claim to arbitration since "Apple is not a party to the T-Mobile agreement, and Apple has not shown" that it could enforce it.
Charles Martin
Amber Neely
Sponsored Content
AppleInsider Staff
2 Comments
So it sounds like messages are lock to phone not phone number or your Apple ID, does that make sense? but they also talk about recycling phone numbers, my understand they can not reuse numbers for 6 months so does that mean when number shows back up in service it starts setting all the texts. Why is this limited to just T-mobile all companies do this.
i wonder if this has anything to do with fact when you get new phone and set everything again it takes Apple some time to associate your phone number Apple ID to that phone so you get IMessages. When I got my new phone people kept telling me that they were getting green text for me and they thought I was no longer on an iPhone turns out it took a couple of days for Apple ID to be associated with numbers on the new phone. I think this was Apple’s fix to the problem when people forgot to delete their Apple ID on an old iPhone and stop getting messages.
Surprised this one took so long for a complaint to be raised, it was a pretty big privacy error on Apple's. part.