The Palm Pre is phoning home each night and giving away your location
In some sort of bizarre take on the old line from the movie E.T. – The Extra Terrestrial, your Palm Pre wants to phone home … and give away your location.
A blogger named Joey Hess was digging around in the webOS of his Palm Pre when he discovered some interesting lines of code. It seems that each night the Pre calls up the Palm servers and delivers to them information about where you are, which apps you’ve used and for how long, crash logs and a list of your installed apps. While some of this data seems harmless, it is the location information that has users of the newest handset from Pal up in arms.
As this news hit the Internet yesterday, blogs far and wide took up crying “foul” over Palm doing such a thing. However, it isn’t surprising to learn that Palm is perfectly within its legal rights to do this. Matthew Miller over at ZDNet did some digging in the Terms & Conditions of the Palm Pre contract and found the following:
You agree that Palm and its subsidiaries, affiliates, partners, suppliers, and agents (collectively, Affiliates) may collect, store, access, disclose, transmit, process, and otherwise use your Registration Data, account or Device information, content, and technical data for Palm and its Affiliates to provide you with the Services, address your requests, provide technical support, process any transactions for your account, and otherwise in accordance with Palm’s privacy policy. Palm may also provide or enable certain Services through your Device that rely upon location information. In order to provide such Services, Palm and its Affiliates may collect, store, access, disclose, transmit, process, and otherwise use your location data (including real time geographic information) in accordance with Palm’s privacy policy. You also agree that Palm has the right, without liability to you, to disclose any information, including but not limited to your Registration Data and other information, to law enforcement authorities or government officials, to the extent Palm believes is reasonably necessary or appropriate.
So, yes, buried in the long winded contract that you signed when you bought the phone, you gave the company the permission to do this. Of course this doesn’t make it sit any easier with the customers, but Palm is trying to set any fears you have about what is being done with this data at ease. The following official statement was released late yesterday:
Palm takes privacy very seriously, and offers users ways to turn data collecting services on and off. Our privacy policy is like many policies in the industry and includes very detailed language about potential scenarios in which we might use a customer’s information, all toward a goal of offering a great user experience. For instance, when location based services are used, we collect their information to give them relevant local results in Google Maps. We appreciate the trust that users give us with their information, and have no intention to violate that trust.
While it is nice that Palm says you can turn this off… would they mind telling us how? Joey Hess figured out how to do by adding lines of code to his Pre, but it seems doubtful your average cell phone user is going to go quite that far.
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