IA32 is pushing elephants up steep hills - Bob Colwell, former chief architect at Intel
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Palm Pre phones home a lot
IT SEEMS THAT all those former Apple employees now working for Palm have carried over their former boss's desire for control over users.
A bogger called Josh has posted that he suddenly noticed his Palm Pre mobile was periodically uploading information to the company.
Josh said he found that the WebOS was telling Palm exactly where he was. Okay, it was not very accurate, but close enough for him to find his house.
His phone was also telling Palm what he does with every application and for how long. The data is sent every day.
It also sends information to Palm when a WebOS app crashes. This apparently happens a lot more than users notice as some apps are crashing fairly frequently behind the scenes. When that occurs the crash is logged and a system state snapshot taken.
Apparently this spying can be disabled but it takes a bit of an effort. Palm's antics are all covered in its privacy policy, which users have to agree to in order to use the phone, so all this is perfectly legal. µ
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The fact that Yahoo/Gmail etc are doing it without some people's knowledge doesn't suddenly make it acceptable.
The issues here are more to do with disclosure and deliberate consent rather than the practical applications of such snooping.
I don't have a problem with their policy for what they gather. For example, anyone who has used a mobile phone during the better part of this decade has a mobile GPS transponder in their pocket that runs 24/7 as long as the battery is live (think E-911). Plus I'm sure Palm can share location data with Sprint to improve services where signal may be low or to isolate a specific tower malfunction.
In regard to the crash reporting- the whole world is used to this concept vis-a-vis anyone who has Windows 95 or better. This kind of policy nearly always results in an improved product.
For the collection of personal data / the Google clause - anyone who has an online e-mail account since ~1997 when Yahoo & Hotmail first came out has (usually unknowingly) agreed to said company mining through their mail for useful data for marketing or other informational purposes-- also there's the part about your mail not belonging to you, but rather to the company who runs your preferred e-mail service.
In short, nothing new at all. Nothing that people all over the world haven't agreed or consented to billions of times in the past two decades of the information age.
Nothing to see here-- move along.
It's what happens when you let business get in the way of proper engineering and testing.
public beta!
I can see them wanting crash reporting, I imagine most users would want that as well, so long as their cellular provider will give them a free update to the next version of the os with all the bugs fixed.
Knowing what you're doing and for how long is also something I don't blame them for wanting, but I really think they should ask first (like ms does) and I would expect many people would say no.
Positional data etc seems totally unreasonable and too personal.
In any event, maybe it's written into the agreement, but I think privacy matters should be required to be disclosed verbally, not in fine print.
Unsure whether this is an extremely politically incorrect way of describing someone from the Irish hinterland or whether you have a very low opinion of him and can't tell us exactly what you think.
it isnt people who are fine with it, it is amoeba-brained morons who are fine with it.
this kind of espionage is not acceptable along with the rest of the intrusive ethos that seems to be cropping up all too often.
it should be opposed by one and all or else we will end up in a slave-state driven by paranoia and fear
You know I am disappointed with Palm but not suprise everybody wants to be in your business. What is crazy people seem to be fine with it.