covering the week's top textbooks like
Linux - Tim Hortons is facing a
class-action lawsuit in Quebec over data
collection issues in the company's
mobile ordering app filed a day after
for privacy watchdogs announced a joint
investigation into the company's
overreach the court application filed by
to Montreal based law firms on Tuesday
cites an investigative story by the
Financial Post which revealed the Tim
Hortons app was logging users location
data in the background even when the app
wasn't open the app was streaming GPS
location data to radar Labs Inc an
American company which analyzes location
data to infer where users live and work
and logs a person's visits to one of Tim
Hortons competitors such as Starbucks or
McDonald's Corp immediately after
privacy commissioners for the federal
government Quebec Alberta and British
Columbia announced their joint
investigation on Monday Tim Hortons said
in a statement that it has discontinued
its practice of tracking losing users
location when the app is not open the
lead plaintiff is a Montreal resident
who works in the IT sector and even
though defined by his lawyer as a tech
savvy guy he was shocked to find out how
the app was tracking him consumer
protection lawyer Joey Zuk Zuk Rijn said
that simply stopping the practice of
background location tracking isn't
enough because Tim Hortons parent
company appears to have been tracking
the lead plaintiff since last year and
the damage is already done
saccharin says they've gained a valuable
database of information and behavior
patterns and activities of individuals
so are they now just going to throw that
out or are they going to profit from it
my guess my guess is the latter Tim
Hortons chief corporate officer Duncan
full syns
Fulton said in an e-mailed statement the
company did not have any comment on the
class-action lawsuit and reiterated that
it had discontinued background
location-tracking
although the app may still record user
location when it's open in many cases of
privacy violations is difficult to sue
because litigants can't put a dollar
value
on the harm they have suffered but the
Quebec Charter of Rights and Freedoms
makes privacy a protected rate and that
simplifies the case most privacy and
data cases in Canada have been focused
on breaches where companies allowed
private information to be leaked or
stolen by hackers but litigation around
issues relating to data and privacy
could become more common depending on
how the courts respond in this case and
future cases