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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