Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Palm Pre Reports Your Location and Usage To Palm

Posted by Soulskill on from the caught-palm-red-handed dept.

AceJohnny writes "Joey Hess found that his Palm Pre was ratting on him. It turns out the Pre periodically uploads detailed information about the user to Palm, including the names of installed apps, application usage (and crashes), as well as GPS coordinates. This, of course, is without user consent or control. The only way he found to disable the uploads was to modify system files."

5 of 314 comments (clear)

  1. Did it not occur to PALM that this is BAD? by masterlogan2000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Did Palm not think that someone would figure this out? I wonder what kind of backlash there will be about this and how much more negative impact it will have on the Palm brand.

    1. Re:Did it not occur to PALM that this is BAD? by XxtraLarGe · · Score: 5, Insightful

      True. Likely there will be no repercussions whatever. Yet another example of an amoral corporation not giving a shit about their customers. Welcome to the 21st century.

      And that's different from other centuries how?

      --
      Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
    2. Re:Did it not occur to PALM that this is BAD? by Jawn98685 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      VP of Engineering: "Dude, they're going to find out, and they'll be pissed."
      VP of Marketing: "This is going to be great. Think of all the things we could do with this information. Think of all the people we could sell that information to. The feature stays."

    3. Re:Did it not occur to PALM that this is BAD? by drunkle+j · · Score: 5, Insightful

      In fact, I just mentioned this article to a co-worker who was showing off his shiny new Pre to me late last week, which after using it for a few days and finding out contrary to what the clerk told him that he could in fact not sync with iTunes, He's clocking out now to return it to the store he bought it from and promised to be headed to Bestbuy to pick up an iPhone 3GS on the way back...

      So wait.. your coworker was so mad that Palm wouldn't parry Apple's anti-competitive measures and Palm's collection of usage/GPS data, that he rushed out to sign a contract with the company at the center of the warrantless wiretapping debacle? The same company that, in response to hoards of customer complaints, pulled strings in congress to get an unconstitutional ex-post-facto law passed to prevent them from being criminally prosecuted for turning over every bit of customer data they could get their hands on to the feds? Yea, I can see how the average American consumer would make that choice.

  2. the fine print by alain94040 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Let's see if you can find the trick in Palm's privacy policy:

    Personal information is information directly identifiable to you, such as your name, address, email address, and phone number, as well as other non-public information associated with such information. Some examples of how we collect and use personal information include ... [ a list that sounds pretty safe and reasonable]

    The operating word is Some examples: legally, they don't say that the list is exhaustive and that they don't collect information any other way. So the long list of nice looking collection is just a decoy!

    --
    FairSoftware.net -- iPhone dev jobs for geeks by geeks