Class Action Lawsuit Against Apple Over Spectre and Meltdown Vulnerabilities Gets Dismissed

The hardware vulnerabilities Spectre and Meltdown were big deals leading into 2018, but it looks like Apple will avoid major legal action in regard to a class action lawsuit filed against the company.

If you’ll recall, a class action lawsuit was filed against Apple in January of 2018, with the complaint at the time saying, “Apple knew about the Spectre and Meltdown security defects as early as June of last year, and, as such, did not inform its customer base in a meaningful timeframe. In addition to that, the complaint states that Apple cannot implement a fix for Spectre and/or Meltdown without heavily impacting the performance of those processors”. Apple, for its part, did patch the issue for both iOS devices and macOS machines out in the wild, but that did little to assuage folks affected by the issue in the first place.

Which led to that lawsuit. However, AppleInsider is reporting on Friday that the litigation against Apple has been dismissed due to a “lack of standing and failure to state a claim”. Interestingly, the ruling was handed down because neither of the two individuals who kicked off the class action lawsuit were personally affected by either Spectre or Meltdown. Basically, neither plaintiff saw any performance degradation due to the hardware vulnerabilities, so any restitution from Apple wouldn’t be acceptable.

The ruling goes further, though. The judge ruled that while some benchmarks were provided as part of the process, there was no proof that all users were hit with slower or weakened performance. The plaintiffs were unable to show that their iOS devices lost their value in any connection to Spectre or Meltdown as well.

As it stands, the plaintiffs are able to file an amended complaint to the court by January 24 of this year. Unless that happens, though, Apple’s request to dismiss the lawsuit has been granted by the court.

[via AppleInsider]

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