• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, August 1, 2017

Siding with Apple, a federal judge has shut down a false advertising class action brought by iPhone and iPad users who say they were duped into believing that phones would protect their privacy.

The ruling, issued last week by U.S. District Court Judge Jon Tigar in San Francisco, still allows individual users to proceed against Apple. But as a practical matter, the cost of doing so often is prohibitively expensive.

The decision is the latest development in long-running litigation over allegations that app developers secretly uploaded iPhone users' address books. The battle dates to 2012, when researchers revealed that mobile social network Path (now Kong Technologies) and Hipster (later acquired and shut down by AOL) accessed and stored users' address books without their knowledge.

Security researchers subsequently reported that other developers -- including Foodspotting, Foursquare Labs, Gowalla, Instagram, Kik Interactive, Twitter and Yelp -- also had uploaded users' address books. Unlike Path, those other developers reportedly asked people for permission to access their address books, in order to help them connect with friends who also used the service. But Foodspotting, Yelp, Twitter and the others allegedly didn't say they would keep the data in their servers.

iPhone user Marc Opperman, along with other consumers, sued Apple and more than a dozen developers for allegedly violating users' privacy. The app developers recently agreed to resolve the allegations.

The claims against Apple include accusations that the company misled users with ads touting security features that were supposed to protect users' data. The consumers asked Tigar to authorize a class-action on behalf of everyone who purchased an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch before 2012.

Apple opposed that request for several reasons, including that the consumers had not proven that all purchasers saw "uniform" privacy-related ad promises from Apple.

Tigar agreed with Apple, writing that the consumers "failed to demonstrate that Apple’s privacy-related marketing was sufficiently extensive to support an inference of class-wide exposure."

He said in the ruling that some of Apple's ads "may have touched on the question of iDevice privacy." But, he added, the consumers hadn't shown that proposed class members relied on Apple's statements about the specific security features that may have been relevant to the address-book uploads.