San Francisco, CA: Hipster Inc, the company behind the hip hipster photo-sharing app is facing an Internet privacy class action lawsuit over allegations it illegally obtained iPhone users' personal information and contact lists without their permission.
The lawsuit, entitled Francisco Espitia v. Hipster Inc., Case No. 13-cv-00432 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that a function of the Hipster app found and retrieved subscribers' personal contacts and other highly sensitive information, including passwords and geo-location, and then transferred the data over unencrypted, publicly accessible data channels to Hipster' third-party servers.
Specifically, the lawsuit states: "These actions involved the deliberate and intentional circumvention of technical measures within the mobile computing device in order to bypass the technical and code based barriers, including the plaintiffs' and class members' privacy settings which were intended to limit access by anyone other than the owner of the device."Having transferred the users' contact address data to its remote computing service, Hipster then allegedly proceeded to access and use such data without authorization or consent, according to the lawsuit.
Among the charges Hipster is facing are violations of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Stored Communications Act, the California Computer Crime Law, and the California Invasion of Privacy Act.
The lawsuit seeks to represent all US residents that downloaded the Hipster app to their mobile phones from January 1, 2011 to the present. The plaintiffs are represented by Parisi & Havens LLP, and The Law Offices of Alan Himmelfarb. The plaintiffs are represented by David C. Parisi and Suzanne L. Havens Beckman of Parisi & Havens LLP, The Law Office of Joseph H. Malley and The Law Offices of Alan Himmelfarb.
