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Palm Pre Reports Your Location and Usage To Palm
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."
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.
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
Ok, add them to the list.
Actually it's getting hard to keep track. Should we start a wiki?
Yes, it is probably not the best idea to upload crash information without user consent, but seriously folks, it's crash data. It's a way for Palm to find bugs in the field that would have been undiscovered in the testing labs.
Google does this all the time. Oh sure, it happens on the server where you can't see it, but the bugs occur and they need some way to log them.
Please, can I have my pretty, shiny leash, please? It offers me so much Freedom!
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
I'm totally never buying a palm because of this.
Wait.
maybe it's because their stuff sucks and is super behind the times.
It took them how long to put wifi in one their devices? Treos have practically never had wifi, what is up with that?
Ze Atomic Device! It iz Ztolen!
Story says...
This, of course, is without user consent or control.
But From Palm Infocenter, they say
Palm's own "Terms and Conditions" statement, along with their Privacy policy, detail that Palm basically maintains it has the right to indefinitely collect, process, store and share this information. Users must accept this multipage collection of fine-print waivers and disclaimers in full during the initial device setup process before being able to utilize the device.
I read the privacy policy and it doesn't really seem like it's built to cover this kind of snooping.
And then there's this:
You may choose whether or not to provide your personal information to us. If you choose not to do so, you can continue to interact with Palm, but you may not be able to take advantage of certain products, services, offers, or options that depend on personal information.
So is there a website or a setting on the Pre to disable this thing. TFA seems to say there isn't.
I mean, there's utility in understanding how people are using your device. But not letting your users know you're uploading daily usage stats and not giving them a way to turn it off?
Truly Uncool.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
even if it doesn't send any data, just by being in contact with some base station tower every few minutes. That tracking info IS used in civil and LE investigations regularly. And as Hans Reiser found, removing your phone battery to stop the tracking is considered incriminating evidence in its own right.
Oh, I see, this isn't about an Apple product. Carry on then.
OK, I can see sending what applications are installed and what crashes have occurred given the user's explicit permission - I allow my Ubuntu boxes to participate in the "popularity contest" wherein what apps I install are (anonymously) logged, and I will frequently send crash reports to help get the cause of the crash fixed.
In both of those cases *I* decide if it happens, and I was informed of the data being uploaded.
But automatically reporting my GPS locations - HELL NO!!!
Yes, the Pre is a phone - as such it MUST, BY LAW be able to report its location to 911 (here in the US, natch). My phone (which is NOT a Pre) has been configured to turn GPS off for anything OTHER than E911. If I found out that it was NOT abiding by that selection - that it was sending position data to anyone other than E911 - then not only would I be terminating my cell contract, I would be filing suit against the makers of the phone AND the cell carrier.
Again, I can see why Palm would want apps installed and crash data - but WHAT DAMN BUSINESS is it of theirs to know position?!?!
www.eFax.com are spammers
My Motorola i776 is GPS-enabled, but when it was stolen, Boost Mobile said they couldn't use the feature to find my phone. Probably because they get a cut of the hundred bucks it cost me to replace it.
Free Martian Whores!
You know, that total control of their users and the things they can and can't do. Apple should not control their users like that, it's just...
Oh wait, you mean someone else than Apple is doing that?
Damn you Microsoft, always controlling your users....
Oh wait, you mean it's neither Apple or Microsoft?
So, you zealots who always bash on Apple and Microsoft... what FUD will you say to protect your precious Palm now? And wasn't Google's Android doing something similar too?
The solution is easy: get a cellphone that's JUST A GODAMN PHONE.
They may be if the crash is in a location based application...
Just sayin'. We need more detail on what the crash logs were from.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Do you think manufacturers can usually track that info about their users?
That, on the face of it, sounds unlikely.
I mean, I don't expect HTC to track me when I use my G1 (google on the other hand almost certainly does, but can be easily disabled, by turning off the location tracking)
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
In the spirit of blaming Apple for Palm's misbehavior with their iTunes stunt please respond here with how this is also Apples fault.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Isn't it great how the courts can ask Motorola where you are but you can't?
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
Although I am not your customer, were I your customer, I would gladly be a beta tester and give you all sorts of useful information (automated or otherwise) about how I used your products.
This being said, I would hope that you would have the courtesy of asking me to opt-in, rather than assuming that you own my usage habits.
"Hell, I thought all phones did this anyway"
Running the GPS on a phone eats up the battery, I wouldn't assume any phone company would be purposefully sabotaging the battery life of its own products to piss off its customers.
And tracking of cell phones has come up in the past, and is generally quite controversial: http://www.insidetech.com/news/articles/2299-controversial-study-tracks-movement-via-cellphones
I honestly don't know why Palm thought it could get away with it without some outrage. Especially when it has such a steep hill ahead of it already.
I am not sure I would want them knowing what apps I have installed either. Why do they need to know? If it is a 3rd party application and it crashes have a filed stored on the phone so the crash handling application knows where to send the dump file or whatever. Palm does not need to know that my google maps application crashed, google needs to know. So send the error report directly to google.
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
Hmmm, lets see how accurate 1984 is in this case:
An ultra-facist, ultra controlling government that...
1) Watches, analyzes, and controls your every move to identify possible revolutionaries.
2) Controls all commerce and businesses
3) Outlaws sex for pleasure (even with your spouse)
4) Convinces children to rat on their own parents.
5) Uses constant warefare, drugs, and pornography to subdue the masses
6) Re-writes history to suit its present needs
7) Tortures and/or kills anyone who resists it
8) Encourages (forces?) racism and nationalism to the point of incoherent rage in every citizen.
versus a private company that...
1) Retrieves information when your phone software crashes
Sorry, I'm just not seeing it.
Or you could see them as self-fulfilling. Who's to say that they would even have thought of such things without the fiction giving them the idea?
Woops, looks like /. is hammering the server. Here's a copy of the text (as of now):
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
What idiot thought doing this without user opt-in was a good idea?
To see if the issue is related to the towers you are connecting to.
Which they get by the cellular infrastructure backhaul, rather than by GPS.
www.eFax.com are spammers
http://www.precentral.net/fyi-pre-reports-your-location-palm
When PreCentral's people asked Palm about this, their official statement to them in part was:
Our goal has been to follow industry best practices on data collection, use, and encryption. Like most EULAs and privacy policies, though, the terms tend to get pretty detailed about potential scenarios. And because the terms are meant to notify users about all possible variations, we wanted to err on the side of over notifying rather than under notifying users through the terms of use. So there's really nothing here "beyond the norm" for a EULA or privacy policy.
The provision you've quoted explains why Palm might collect user information. For example, we collect and transmit users' email addresses, email content, contact lists, etc. to provide WebOS services such as back-up and restore for the purpose of backing up that data and helping users restore the data if needed (in that case, it would not be limited to just the email address collected at registration). If users someday make purchases on their device through the Apps Catalog, then we would also collect payment information to process the transaction.
At all times, we'd be strictly bound by our privacy policy. Our privacy policy, like virtually all others in the industry, contemplate our using data to provide services users have requested, improve our products and services (hence the reference to Palm's own "sales and marketing" in the privacy policy), troubleshoot, etc. We also refer to affiliates because Palm is a global company, and we may need to transmit data from our European subsidiary to the parent company. We're obviously not a conglomerate with many different subs and affiliates, but the terms specifically mention subs and affiliates so that we can comply with European data protection laws that require us to spell out that data collected by a European sub can be transmitted to another part of the company.
Canada's privacy laws disallows this, especially not notifying the user. As soon as it leaks out to the CRTC and the Privacy Commish, they may disallow this device for sale in Canada later this month.
But my god, what was Palm thinking? Disappointing.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
...with the realization that conventional advertising no-longer works the way it once did --- companies are mining data to deliver targeted advertising to consumers.
Nothing to see here.
Move along.
"--wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy." --Benjamin Franklin
Actually, it's the cellular companies that want that data more. By having the phones report back on position and cell tower ID strengths, they can more easily map "dead zones" in their coverage areas, telling them where to put new towers to hit the most people.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
If this is true, it strikes at the very heart of the products saleability. The pre is quite the phone in geek worlds, which unfortunatly for them, tend to be the ones that care about stuff like this!
By doing this they have alienated a real core market that could have made the Pre a good geek phone rather than a has been phone.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
Maybe because as the GP said, many of us already assume the cell phone companies are tracking us. So, if many have that assumption, what significant backlash could Palm get? Worst case scenario, they can pull a "think of the children" clause or "public safety" line of bull.
Palm provides an OTA backup service to ease restores. You opt into it when you start the phone and can turn it off at any time. Obviously it sends this and all sorts of data to their servers. Considering that TFA doesn't mention disabling this service, I have to wonder if he's a) right b) malicious c) stupid.
Isn't it great how the courts can ask Motorola where you are but you can't?
You just need to sue yourself and then ask Motorola for the location of your phone so that you can serve legal documents to yourself.
Palm announces a new model that doesn't phone home. It will be called the "Palm Post"
Allows Google to automatically collect anonymouse location data to improve the quality of location services.
OK, OK, OK, it is google which is collecting the data. Since they are not evil, it should not matter. A simple case of false alarm. Cool down guys, there is nothing to see here, move along.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Do people not think that AT&T doesn't know where you are with your iphone? Or that Apple doesn't know what apps you downloaded from the app store?
It might not be fun to think about, but the cell phone companies know where you are calling from, who you are calling and how long you talk to everyone.
Come to think of it, so do the land line companies.
As for smart phones, particularly if you have loaded apps for local weather, news, movies, food, etc. Exactly how is it supposed to work without the company knowing your location?
I guess, Palm and Sprint could have notified their customers, although it does seem to be common sense. Then again, the credit card companies don't notify people that they are selling lists of what you purchase and where, too.
The moral of the story--if you want to be in a connected society, live with it.
My Motorola i776 is GPS-enabled, but when it was stolen, Boost Mobile said they couldn't use the feature to find my phone.
Shoulda just called the number and said "Where you at?"
But seriously, if Boost gave you the location of the phone, they would be liable if you shot or otherwise visited an kind of harm upon the guy who stole it. Er vice versus. I suppose they could give the information to the police, but tracking down a hundred dollar theft is a waste of police resources.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Shoulda just called the number and said "Where you at?"
Tried it, it didn't work. I would have given the info to the cops; they'll respond to a five dollar shoplifing incident, why shouldn't they respond to my hundred dollar phone? If I stole a new phone from Best Buy you can bet your wife's ass they'd put me in the slammer.
Free Martian Whores!
So that law enforcement can subpoena Palm and ask for user location at x time on the day of x crime, to determine if they're in the area.
I bet this is a new 'service' they offer.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I would have said that was ridiculous, but after Wells Fargo suing itself, not so much.
Your attempt to reason is thoughtcrime, comrade.
Hell, tracking down car thieves caught on camera is a waste of their time apparently. For a while my friend was having problems with cars being broken into and stolen (for a one year period they had 3 car thefts and 2 car break-ins just for people in their house, the next door neighbors had problems, too) so he installed a camera with 8 hours of record time and his car got stolen again. When he told the reporting officer he had them recorded in the act, he didn't even want to see it. The quality wasn't great, but he didn't know that, because he refused to even look at it. WTF is wrong here?
they'll respond to a five dollar shoplifing incident, why shouldn't they respond to my hundred dollar phone
The shoplifter is present and detained in the store, and the shopkeeper witnessed the theft with his own eyes. There's no hour-long triangulation process wherein you figure out the 100 yard radius where the phone is, and then demand that every person in the area submit to search, or maybe the guy is in his own house, and some GPS coordinates aren't probable cause for entry...
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
So why not hack the thing so it sends what you want it to send? Somewhere innocuous, somewhere whimsical, or just random locations. You could have fun with this.
"Yes, I really was at the North Pole yesterday. And in Paris the day before. Isn't air travel great!"
...laura
When you buy palm you agree that it backs itself up to the palm servers. users are notified and sign on to this.I don't see why they need GPS but the rest is resonable.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
(used to work for Nextel, know their location infrastructure well).
I suspect that the basic reason for this is that customer care doesn't have the tools to do it.
The network infrastructure is there, and the tools are there, but Sprint probably hasn't invested in giving this kind of capability to care organizations. Plus, there ARE some (minor, overblown, redherring but real) concerns there about impersonation, spoofing and such, particularly in Boost land where the amount of information known about customers is pretty minimal to begin with.
***Foucault is watching you..***
Probably pedantic, but Motorola wouldn't know. It would be strictly the carriers.
I had a set of home built speakers stolen from my car back in 1978, the police were very diligent in getting them back. That's their job, and with the triangulation it's the judges job to issue a warrant.
Free Martian Whores!
"Hell, I thought all phones did this anyway"
Running the GPS on a phone eats up the battery
If you already have the almanac, it will only take ~3 seconds to get a GPS position. I used to do it all the time at work, and that was a cornerstone of the business.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Running the GPS on a phone eats up the battery, I wouldn't assume any phone company would be purposefully sabotaging the battery life of its own products to piss off its customers.
You may already realize this, but for clarity's sake: GPS isn't needed to track phones. They can be tracked simply from their signal as long as there are multiple towers within range to receive it. So probably in any city you can be tracked.
And tracking of cell phones has come up in the past, and is generally quite controversial: http://www.insidetech.com/news/articles/2299-controversial-study-tracks-movement-via-cellphones
It may be controversial when some scientists announce that they're going to be using tracking data. That doesn't mean you aren't quietly being tracked anyway. Hell, carriers are required to give your position to law enforcement or emergency services. Since this kind of tracking is more or less passive -- it's based on your normal cell signal, no extra data is being sent by your phone -- then unlike with the Palm Pre's GPS you have no direct way of knowing if you're being tracked or not. You just know it's possible.
The enemies of Democracy are
Running the GPS on a phone eats up the battery, I wouldn't assume any phone company would be purposefully sabotaging the battery life of its own products to piss off its customers.
Some observations from a Pre owner. The GPS is on all the time by default (one reason for the Pre's reported poor battery life). When the GPS is off, it still can get a general idea where you are (this based on the fact when you open the Google Maps application it knows what city I'm in with a large circle indicating the "margin of error"). Turning the GPS off improves battery life significantly, so I deduce that the GPS receiver is really off.
lexbaby
"Be Brave, Be Loyal, Be True." -- Hawkeye Pierce
If it's a "da-da-daah da-da-daah da-da-daah" interference pattern, that's a location update. Why yours is doing it so often, I don't know. Other than an odd manufacturer, my main guess would be that you are in poor coverage. If the phone drops out of coverage, it will call in when it re-associates. Sending or receiving an SMS would cause it, as would using GPRS (do you poll for email?).
It has come to the author's attention that every time a user browses a web page, the following information is sent to the website's owner, without any formal warning or opt-out procedure made available to the end-user :-
1. Date / Time information
2. IP address (which can be used to establish the user's geographic position)
3. Browser Software information and details of installed extensions.
4. Data from cookies (which of course everyone knows contains viruses, spyware and other nasty shit).
5. The address of the webpage requested (which could be used to track user's browsing habits)
And worst of all, this data is collected possibly indefinately (or until the server's hard disk is full of access.log files anyway), and is known to be used to aggregate stats using AWSTATS and other "stat" software which displays coloured graphs and details on countries, browsers, time spent on the site, number of pages visited etc. With no regard whatsoever to the European and other Data Protection laws, and no method of having this personal data removed from these servers.
It's only a matter of time before unscrupulous website owners start using this data to decide website policies such as popular language support, versions of pages suitable for mobile and other devices, and perhaps even to sell us something we MIGHT NOT WANT !!!
THIS HAS TO STOP, THIS SPYING ON USERS IS CRIMINAL AND MUST STOP NOW !!!
Yours,
Chicken Little
Okay, they can have my data, but guess what else they're getting? A whole lot of randomly generated crap data. What's this? I was in antarctica only moments ago and now I'm on the beach in Hawaii? I'm opening hundreds of apps a minute - all of which are crashing immediately?
They can have my data, they just won't be able to make it useful.
or else!
You may already realize this, but for clarity's sake: GPS isn't needed to track phones. They can be tracked simply from their signal as long as there are multiple towers within range to receive it.
With with only one tower in range you can (of course) be located as being in its service area and which "pie wedge" you're in. If it exports the distance from the timing handshake (and you're not in a signal shadow and communicating using a reflection) that can be narrowed to an arc around it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The Palm people -- all their pieces and parts since they split the hardware from the OS and then killed the OS and began to make crappy hardware that they don't support -- have got to be robots. They're so stupid they obviously can't breathe on their own.
With with only one tower in range you can (of course) be located as being in its service area and which "pie wedge" you're in. If it exports the distance from the timing handshake (and you're not in a signal shadow and communicating using a reflection) that can be narrowed to an arc around it.
Interesting. How does it figure direction from only one tower... *remembers what cell towers look like* *lightbulb goes on* duh from which of the antennae receives the signal.
So yeah they can narrow down your location to an extent with just one tower. Also means they can do a much better job of determining your location with just two towers.
The enemies of Democracy are
They are dismantling our society, in case you didn't notice. Honest police work is punished when directed at lower and lowest-class OR upper and top-class people while nickel-and-diming of middle class is encouraged.
It's proles and untouchables vs. we the people.
If the two towers measure and report your distance (using turnaround time adjustments to your cellphone to fit it into the Rx time slot) they can put you on one of two points - one of which can be eliminated by antenna pattern.
If the two towers can't accurately measure your distance but CAN agree on timing for measuring the moment of their reception of your signal, they can put you on a constant-distance-difference hyperbola between them, ala classic LORAN.
I think the ones typically deployed these days can do both, putting you on a fuzzy dot on a hyperbola using only two towers.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
yup. In fact tracking info is needed to tweak tower hand-off handling algorithms and such and all sorts of other QoS data.
As long as you have a computing system that can have more than one item in memory at one time, it starts to get very important how these things interact. Microsoft learned this a long time ago that applications could interact in destructive ways.
Maybe the folks a Palm figured that out as well. Do you not think it possible that your third-party application could impact Palm applications? And that it might be an important clue that thousands of dumps come in with each and every one of them having the same mysterious application instaled?
Would you rather the attitude be that if you install software this removes any support obligation from Palm?
Does this do when over seas / data roaming and you get a big data bill?
If so as this a Sprint phone with a 2 year lock in and forced data can they bill for data roaming that can not be turned off with out hacking the phone and it's not like you are useing the data the phone is doing it on it's own?
That would be done with the tower data, not by querying individual phones. Although both are related to cellular service, they're miles apart in terms of privacy issues. Plus, the data would actually be relevant and accurate from the towers, unlike occasional positions from a phone.
Provide an API of functions an application can access, make sure an app stays in its own memory, via the API do not allow the application to have access to say the contacts with out a system message being displayed to the user first, etc.
As long as you have a computing system that can have more than one item in memory at one time, it starts to get very important how these things interact. Microsoft learned this a long time ago that applications could interact in destructive ways.
Microsoft did learn this, they gave each process its own memory space and required that each application say within its own allocated space.
Would you rather the attitude be that if you install software this removes any support obligation from Palm?
Dell, HP, and Microsoft do not void the warranty if you install software on your computer. They tell you that you have to first restore your system to its factory settings. Why not do the same thing with a palm pre?
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
I had a set of home built speakers stolen from my car back in 1978, the police were very diligent in getting them back. That's their job, and with the triangulation it's the judges job to issue a warrant.
But, that was 1978. A lot has changed. Cops back then weren't getting successfully sued any time they sneezed wrong, and most local cops had a decent relationship with the individual people of the community and really cared. They also had a lower workload that allowed them time to investigate crimes that *didn't* make TV News.
If the "me" of 1978 were to be transported to now, I'd likely think I was in another country. I'd be right, too. This isn't the country it used to be, although sadly I'd probably be familiar with the behavior of our current President, as he seems to be going for "Jimmy Carter, Part Deux" in regards to foreign policy (and energy policy to a certain extent). He seems to be channeling his "inner Hillary" when it comes to Healthcare though.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Actually, I wonder if you could sue a John Doe for stealing your phone, and then subpoena the current GPS info from the carrier in order to prosecute...
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
Didn't Palm outsource all of its coding to India?
In which case, there may or may not be the capability of wasting work time to read Slashdot like I'm doing. From what I hear, most of the programming facilities there are pretty restrictive of web access. I suppose the coders might access Slashdot from home, but ...
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Ya wanna go to a club where people wee on each other?
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
Roaming (data or voice) can be turned off on the Pre without hacking. It's on the Preferences screen for the dialer app.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Sometimes the Pre's location service thinks I'm in the middle of Dallas, TX. The trouble is, that's several hundred miles away. WTF is the deal with that?
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
OK, maybe Palm is not like 1984... but looking over your list is a little scary seeing as we seem to have 6 or 7 of the 8 conditions going on currently.
This space available.
Except these updates are daily, not every second. So Palm knows where you are once per day. And it's not clear that they have any identification information that they can use to link a certain report to a certain user. Unless your carrier informs Palm of which user bought which Palm Pre, in which case, we have a whole other privacy issue on our hands.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
"An ultra-facist, ultra controlling government that..."
You're wrong as it was an ultra socialist government based 100% on the Soviet Communist party and as Orwell believed (and had personal experience with in Spain) would be the logical outcome of the English left wing "intelligentsias" (who he had absolutely no love for) writings and beliefs of the day.
Orwell himself became a Democratic Socialist due to the extreme levels of poverty and wealth disparity he had seen when he went on the road disguised as a vagabond to research his book "A Road to Wigan Pier". BUT he was under no illusion of what the extreme form of socialism (as advocated by many many people on the left at the time) would become should it be implemented, which is why he wrote two books on the subject and hundreds of letters, reviews and essays against not only the Fascists but also Communists and the useful idiots in the academic left wing who fawned over the Russian style of Socialism rather than wanting to maintain a democracy that had Socialist tendencies as Orwell advocated for.
The more you know.
P.S I've noticed that as a country politically moves to the right the "baddies" in old fiction suddenly become left wing and when a country moves to the left the "baddies" in the same books suddenly become right wing, I'm not sure if that's a problem or not (outside of the cognitive dissonance it displays).
No; we can choose to have cell phones that can be used to track our positions if they are turned on and registering to a network.
You'd probably need a police report and therefore risk criminal charges for filing a false one.
--- You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad- Neal (not Cowboy) Boortz
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...
Honestly I think this would be a dumb move, being that Apple is more "evil" than Palm, and AT&T is more "evil" than Sprint.
Consider this:
* If Microsoft pulled even HALF the shenanigans Apple does ("fixing" iTunes when thrd parties figure out ho to sync to it, suing the competition, suing people who leak info on unreleased products, etc etc) they'd be hauled into court and sued into oblivion. But, Apple can still get away with it because they are not a monopoly and their products are hip/pretty/actually work well. Doesn't make it any less evil than if MSFT had done it.
* iPhone is more closed than Pre. Yes yes, I know BSD kernel and all but there are gobs of proprietary stuff all over it. Much more opportunity to "do evil" and get away with it since it is tougher to hack. Per is comparitively open--they were MUCH quicker to release APIs, their software stack consists of far more Free software and it is architecturally VERY similar to several Free-software-friendly mobile devices (Beagleboard, Zoom, Always Innovating Touchbook, Pandora handheld). Making its Pres phone home is evil, but at least they are more open and honest than Apple has been known to be.
* All phone companies are evil, but AT&T has the dubious distinction of being a full and wililng participant in warrantless wiretapping of its own customers. It comes from a monoloply heritage. Sprint is far less notorious in that capacity...it is merely known to be incompetent and bumbling at times.
Given the choice I'd elect Pre over iPhone in a heartbeat--both the carriers and the handset manufacturers for the former are more trustworthy--or at the very least easier to keep an eye on. Apple makes the best designed and highest quality but I'm rather disenchanted with their long-time tactics of being ultra-closed. I thought that there was a chance they were changing their game when they went with Intel architecture on their Macs but since then they've proven their spots unchangeable. Pity that--they weren't that evil in their Apple II days--they sued clone makers for their blatant copyright violations but at least their machines were quite open. Perhaps if the other Steve steered the ship (but then Apple products would look far less sexy I suppose).
At least with the Pre (besides being more powerful than the iPhone) if Palm is caught pulling shenanigans it is relatively easy to find and fix it. With Apple...not so sure...if they WERE found out doing something like this, not only would it be harder to turn off, Apple would sue your arse into oblivion if you told anyone about it.
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this is off-topic, but must be mentioned... that chick in the pre TV commercials is very odd looking. it's actually kinda spooky how odd looking she is... sorta alien. it freaks me out and makes me feel like i just witnessed something wrong in a petri dish.
If the "me" of 1978 were to be transported to now, I'd likely think I was in another country. I'd be right, too
You got THAT right. Back then, women would casually ask "wanna fuck?" (sadly I was married). Now days when a woman walks up and says that, she wants money for crack or whiskey. At age 26 I never got carded; now I have a white goatee and and I always do.
I never thought I'd see a worse president than Carter, but Bush way outdid him in his failness.
Free Martian Whores!
Not to belittle your point, but as a citizen of this 1984 community, I seriously doubt you would even notice that you are being manipulated. Many of the points in your 1984 list could be argued as fulfilled, we're just so used to it that it doesn't seem that way.
Take #2 - How long do you think you would be able to buy anything if our government shut off Visa? Or if the electronic networking that connected banks were to be brought down? How much money do you have in your wallet right now?
Try #3 in a public place.
#4 happens all the time in cases of abuse.
#5 - Well duh.
#6 is hard to prove. To many missing emails.
#7 - Guantanamo. Ever heard of it?
#8 has been demonstrated all week. Just check CNN and look for "Health care reform, town hall meetings"
verses a private company that was caught with it's pants down. I'm sure the government will step in, but not because it cares about the law... There are bound to be government employees that will use Palm Pre's, and they certainly don't want THEIR locations and app usage getting out.
Where you go, what applications you are using, what web sites you visit, what businesses you call are a marketing gold mine. A provider can analyse this information to serve you content that is appropriate to your interests and locations. Have you ever ordered pizza on your smart phone? You might be sent pizza coupons for the nearest pizza joint. Do you visit football web sites? You might get ads for the local football team when you're traveling on business. This is extremely creepy, but companies ARE working on developing this kind of technology.
I've been reading this story and posts since this morning and I'm more surprised about the outrage it generated than the fact that they were gathering this information. Like many other posters said, I thought cell companies were doing this anyway. I'm not going to get rid of my Pre or change my habits because of it. What you were saying about the GPS settings, I have mine turned off by default. I figured that it would be a drain on the battery for being on all of the time, and I wanted to know what apps were GPS dependent. I have noticed several times with Google Maps that if I hop around using it, the first map to appear has been the location of the last time that I used the application. It also takes a minute for it to update with my current location and sometimes the map is off. I was using it for driving directions last weekend more so for an accuracy test of the map, and it had me running in parallel of the highway that I was on, in what would be the equivalent of driving through a field. The directions were still accurate. Because I don't feel like making another post, I'll just go on to ask who says that GPS location sometimes won't determine why an app crashes? Maybe the "last known location" put it on the path to a known dead zone, so instead of an engineer having to read through code they can determine that the crash was because of location. The engineer won't have to waste time trying to fix that error, they can work on one that they can actually fix.
FWIW you can turn on GPS so when you lose your phone NTT DoCoMo can help you find it. Also for the very difficult to use but visually impressive map application. All said and done Palm is evil and I won't buy from them anymore but if you could just trust them this would otherwise be useful. In the end it makes the device LESS useful since you can't trust them. I think expecting location privacy from a cellphone is a mistaken endeavor. How can you prove it unless you run your own firewall on the phone?