US technology giant Apple said yesterday it had made its first compensation payment in South Korea over a feature in its smartphone which can track the location of users.
Apple Korea said it had paid 1 million won (US$950) to iPhone user Kim Hyung-suk, complying with a compensation order from a court in the southern city of Changwon.
Kim, a 36-year-old lawyer, filed suit against Apple on April 26. He said the smartphone’s location recording infringed on his constitutional rights to privacy and freedom and caused psychological stress.
He demanded 1 million won, and the court ordered Apple to pay the sum for violating his privacy. Apple Korea said it had not raised an objection to the order.
The settlement was expected to trigger an array of similar lawsuits since South Korea has about 3 million iPhone users.
In April 29, other iPhone users in South Korea filed a joint suit against Apple, following claims that the US company traced and stored geographical data from its mobile device users in countries such as France and Germany.
British security researchers have said the position-logging feature was contained in iOS 4, the operating system for the iPhone and the iPad.
They said iOS 4-equipped iPhones and iPads store latitude and longitude coordinates along with a time stamp, probably through cell-tower triangulation.
The company in May released updated software for iPhones to fix “bugs” that resulted in location data being unencrypted and stored for up to a year.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained