Twilio's Segment SDK challenged with wiretapping claim

Twilio, a communications service provider, was sued on Thursday based on allegations that the developer's Segment software siphons data from mobile apps without consent. The case, Bender v. Twilio, Inc [PDF], was filed in a federal court in San Francisco, California. It alleges that Twilio's Segment SDK – a software …

[ecofeco]

Tech douche bros

... are ALWAYS gonna tech douche bro.

[ddol]

Keep Calm and Carry On

Surely Calm are at fault here for embedding the SDK in their app, and initiating data logging before the user can consent?

[Richard 12]

Re: Keep Calm and Carry On

Yes, but not only.

They presumably can plead ignorance as to what the SDK is doing - perhaps they already have.

More importantly, they probably don't have any money. That's generally the first question before any litigation - what happens if you win? (The second question being "What happens if you lose?)

[Falmari]

Re: Keep Calm and Carry On

"They presumably can plead ignorance as to what the SDK is doing"

But they are not ignorant Calm's "privacy policy describes extensive data collection and sharing but does not specifically mention Twilio or the Segment SDK.". In fact the extensive data collection is the reason Calm is using the SDK.

If like me you have never heard of Twilio, you need to lookup what Twilio actually do. Because the level of profiling and tracking is obscene. In fact I spent hours going through their guides for using the SDK in an android app. Then even more hours on a sample https://github.com/segmentio/analytics-kotlin/tree/main/.github.

Now I have never seen kotlin code so it took time to get a basic understanding of how the code worked. Calm have no excuse for failing to ask for consent it is their responsibility and it easy to do even I could do it.

I assumed that this was case of an app developer using an SDK which was secretly grabbing data. But it's not, Calm are an account customer paying Twilio for the SDK and using it to collect data to profile and track users of their app. It is Calm who are collecting the data not Twilio.

BTW not my down vote I assumed like you Twilio was grabbing the data secretly.

[hayzoos]

Does this sound familiar? Twilio Authy

It did to me so I checked it out. Twilio acquired Authy in 2015.

Never really liked Authy in the first place, but now run as fast as you can.

Never really liked Google Authenticator either for the same reason.

You cannot get away from this data slurp crap, it's everywhere.