It seems that Apple will end the year facing the federal courts, after an iPhone user filed a lawsuit against them in San Jose, California. The complainant, Jonathan Lalo, is accusing Apple of selling users personal information and leaking data to advertisers via the Unique Device Identifier (UDID).

The lawsuit enumerated the violations and specifics of Apple’s data tracking system in a report by Businessweek:

1. Apple’s iPhones and iPads are encoded with identifying devices that allow advertising networks to track what applications users download, how frequently they’re used and for how long.
2. Some apps are also selling supplementary information to ad networks, including the users’ location, age, gender, income, ethnicity, sexual orientation and political views.
3. Apple iPhones and iPads are set with a UDID, which can’t be blocked by users.
4. The complaint singles out quite a few apps as offenders including Pandora, Paper Toss, the Weather Channel and Dictionary.com, naming them as co-defendants

On the other hand, Apple claims that it carefully reviews all applications on its App Store, and would not allow these to transmit user data without customer’s consent. This claim is particularly looking for a class-action status for Apple users who may have been engaged in downloading activities on either their iPhone or iPad from December of 2008 up to last week. Apple has been mum about this issue. They have not released a formal statement to answer the lawsuit.

Apple has been involved in several legal battles this year. Recently, they are one of the several companies that were slapped with infringement violations by Alcatel-Lucent; Canon, LG and TiVo are 3 others.

It is quite interesting to note that campaigns against privacy threats have been very rampant. Issues on data leakage challenged even the industry’s key players like Facebook and Google. But, the two have been somewhat successful in managing all accusations against them and dealing with probes for third party data leaks have been staple for them. Just recently, Google Buzz settles with Gmail users on privacy. It vowed to pay $8.5 million to support privacy education and policy implementation on the web. The social networking giant Facebook on the other end, faced privacy issues thousand miles away, in South Korea. The South Korea Communications Commission demanded Facebook to give details on how it shares data with 3^rd parties, with stress on user information sharing awareness.