Apple is asking a Delaware bankruptcy court to prohibit RadioShack from selling data that the retailer gathered about customers buying Apple products.
I'm RadioShack filed for bankruptcy in February, asking for a court-supervised sell-off of its $1.2 billion in assets. Among those assets was a database of information pertaining to 117 million RadioShack customers, gleaned from mailing lists and service registrations. [Update: Hedge fund Standard General made a winning bid of $26.2 million on Tuesday to buy RadioShack's name, its customer data, and its remaining assets. The sale of the customer data still needs to be approved by bankruptcy court. A hearing is scheduled for May 20.]
The states of Texas and Tennessee filed objections in March to prevent the sale of this customer information, which includes "consumer names, phone numbers, mailing addresses, e-mail addresses, and, where allowed, activity data,” according to Texas’ objection. The states argued that multiple privacy policies from RadioShack promised users that their personal information would never be sold to a third party.
In its own objection to the resale of this information, Apple is saying that RadioShack’s database contains information gathered about Apple customers who bought iPhones and iPads through the retailer. Apple lawyers wrote that RadioShack had agreed to protect Apple customers’ data before being allowed to sell iPhones through its chain stores. "The Reseller Agreement between Apple and RadioShack protects information collected by RadioShack regarding purchasers of Apple products (the “Apple Customer Information”) and prohibits the proposed sale of such information,” Apple wrote.
Apple’s argument to block the sale of the information comes after AT&T also objected to RadioShack’s plan to cash in on its marketing-industry trove. AT&T has said that a portion of the RadioShack database still belongs to the telecom company as part of an agreement with RadioShack to sell cellphones.
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