Everybody loves having their favorite team’s app on their phone, right? You get content about your team from your team. You get photos, you can track the game and you can watch highlights. You can check the schedule and even buy tickets to those games. It’s a great way to connect fans even further to their favorite team and there really isn’t a downside to having it.
Unless you’re a fan of the Golden State Warriors and have their smart app — then there could be some issues. There is a class action lawsuit that was filed on Monday in San Francisco claiming the Warriors’ app (developed by Yinzcam) happens to turn your phone’s microphone on so that it can listen to and record your conversations. The lawsuit claims the app, whether it’s running in the background or being actively used, is always listening to you. This seems like it could be a huge problem. From SFGate.com:
A class action suit filed in San Francisco on Monday claims the Golden State Warriors may know a lot more about you than you think.
The suit says that the team’s free app, developed by a company called Yinzcam, covertly turns on your phone’s microphone in order to listen to and record your conversations. In addition, it alleges that the app uses “beacon technology” developed by Signal360 to track users’ physical locations in order to serve them more personalized ads.
warriorsphoneapp.jpg
“Even more disconcerting, the app turns on the microphone (listening and recording) any time the app is running,” the filing reads. “No matter if a consumer is actively using the app or if it is merely running in the background: the app is listening.”
The suit claims that the defendants knowingly programmed the Warriors app to automatically turn on the user’s phone microphone, which would transmit audio back to the app until the phone was turned off or the app was hard-closed.
This is either the best viral marketing for the new Snowden movie starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt coming out in a couple of weeks, or a gigantic deal that violates privacy issues.
The class action lawsuit is asking for either $100 per day for each member of the suit for the defendants’ violations or $10,000 per member of the suit — whichever one is greater. The COO of Signal360, a company also named in the lawsuit, is denying that this violation is the case and says there is a misunderstanding with how the technology works. She claims there isn’t any storing, intercepting or transmitting of information.
If it does do all of these violating tasks, this technology is light years ahead of the competition.
Courtesy: CBS Sports
