Palm Pre owners: Big Brother is watching

By on Aug 12, 2009 at 2:19 PM
General August 12, 2009

Ruh roh. It looks like Palm may be pulling a Big Brother on Pre owners without their knowledge — until now, anyway. This morning, developer Joey Hess publicly examined a portion of webOS code that reports information back to Palm in order to determine exactly what info the manufacturer is retrieving behind the scenes. What he uncovered, loosely put, is pretty uncool. Pre handsets report at least the following info back to Palm daily:

  • Your location
  • Which apps you’ve used and for how long
  • Your app crash logs
  • Which apps you have installed

Now, this discovery raises all kinds of issues surrounding ethics, disclosure, privacy and a host of other touchy subjects. As with all privacy policies, Palm’s is BS sketchy shady unclear vague broad enough to likely cover such invasions of privacy. Hess does detail a relatively easy way to disable the transfer of personal data back to Palm’s servers but it requires Linux. More convenient methods of disabling this “feature” will likely surface in the coming days but the question as to why Palm needs this personal data remains. So, Pre users, are you guys cool with this?

[Via PreCentral]

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  • phil

    if you really have a big of a problem with things like this going on with cell phone technology, then stay away from it! If you want to be able to google everything in life, every second of the day then odds are your life isnt worth enough to track anyways. I am against the way things are headed, but there are bigger issues than your damn “smartphone”. dont you want it to be smart?

  • Dan

    Well said Phil. Don’t like? Then don’t get a phone with GPS or use an GPS apps or a phone that offers an app back-up service. How is it going to back up an app if is does not store the apps you have? Also like other have said this is something every Pre user agreed to or did not agree to in on of the first screens when you activate the phone. Also to turn it off go to “Location Services” and the last toggle is “Background Data Collection” change it to off if you originally agreed to it when you first activated the phone. Very simple fix for those that feel violated.

  • NYMike

    This story is such a bunch of @#$@#.

    All a user has to do is goto the “location services” app and at the bottom is a switch to turn it off.

    What’s shocking is that the story started I believe on PreCentral, rather than here at the Boy “Iphone-fanboy” Report.

  • Don Louie Cantone

    Initially BGR was pretty fair, other than that review/preview that was never updated, with thier coverage of this phone but since then it’s gotten more nit-picky. Where’s the story on how they’re improving build quality or more apps coming, there is an opt out for this so why make seem like they’ll be monitored regardless of what’s done

  • Pete Wendt

    So what? You’d complain if the phone worked crappy and they weren’t trying to find the problem!

  • shaniac

    And this is different than core Android how?

    Interesting the on some new HTC units with Android they sell the info to Google, but are also collecting the info for themselves. That and every hit of the search button had Google paying HTC (carriers cut out…not that it is an issue).

  • Liz

    Pre will flat out tell you that they collect info on how/when you use or download applications. THERE IS A BACKUP THAT THEY DO FOR YOU EVERY NIGHT, REMEMBER?!?!? And some programs collect your location, and when you download the app, it asks your permission for it. THIS IS NOT ANYTHING NEW. THEY DO IT FOR YOUR BENEFIT!!!!!

  • http://www.jitterbug.com emergency cell phone

    I think most phones do this nowadays.

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