
Palm Pre Privacy Invasion - jawngee
http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/Palm_Pre_privacy/
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ajg1977
To be honest I'm not really sure what the fuss is about.

There is no personally identifying information (such as an ID, phone-number,
account no etc) transmitted and it pales in comparison to what a phone company
has access to, even before cross-referencing cell tower data with their own
records.

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dickwad
if there was a way to make it so that the cell provider didn't know where I
was, I'd want that too.

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qeorge
Sending info when a program crashes is one thing, and it doesn't particularly
bother me. Sending usage data daily when no crash has occurred is an entirely
different matter, and it does bother me.

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potatolicious
IMHO sending crash info still needs to be opt-in. There's also no reason to
burn battery doing it - the iPhone collects these logs and will occasionally
ask you if you'd like to send it to Apple, while you sync to your machine.

That is the right way to do it.

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jmtulloss
When you first create your Palm profile, there is a location privacy
disclaimer than you can accept or not. Basically, the Pre uploads your
location to Google so that they can improve their tower and wifi based
location services. You can opt out at anytime in the Location preferences.

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huhtenberg
Why can't they pull the same information from the towers and wifi APs
themselves though ? They are big enough provider to have this sort of
analytics support already in place.

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jmtulloss
It's not that they can't pull the information from the towers, it's that the
information isn't very good. If you have a real GPS fix and you upload that
fix to Google along with the tower, they can start building a very accurate
map of where what towers/APs are where. Then when somebody comes along that
doesn't have a GPS fix, they can get a better fix than they could otherwise.

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huhtenberg
> _it's that the information isn't very good._

Tower-based cell tracking (triangulation based) generally has the precision of
several meters if not better. That's more than enough for building very
accurate map. Though there's a chance Palm is not allowed to access this
information without a warrant, which would explain why they are using
alternative collection methods.

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likpok
I've noticed that of friends with GPS-phones, the tower tracking is always
horrendous. Generally it is enough to get you into the right part of the city,
but not enough to do any real navigation with.

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Quiark
So basically there are two things. Sending usage data and GPS location. The
first is not a big deal and most people are ok with that, but...

How can ANYONE be ok with sending their GPS location?

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eli
I understand the concern, but you do realize that Sprint could already grab
your location from the cell tower ID if they were so inclined?

(Not to mention every page you visit in the browser...)

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thenduks
I must say, I'm completely fine with this sort of thing. Doesn't bother me
even slightly. I can't image what Palm could use this information for that I
would _not_ be OK with (although I'm sure there are examples), but the fact
that they are pretty clearly using this as part of improving their software --
I'm all for it. I would, however, prefer it to be sent when it's connected to
a computer or something since... well, don't waste my bandwidth :)

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viraptor
> what Palm could use this information for that I would not be OK with

Let's try:

Random Palm employee gets a constant feed of your location == knows how soon
you can be back home. He also knows you have enough money for gadgets like
Pre, so you must have some valuable things at home... Easy burglary.

Yes - it might be a very unlikely scenario, but I'm pretty sure we could come
up with a lot of others, more serious. If there is no real reason for them to
have that data, they should not collect it: security 101 - close down
everything, then enable things you need.

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lallysingh
More interesting: is the transmission encrypted? Secured in any way other than
"it's hard to sniff cell data?"

On another note, does anyone know if it's actually hard to sniff cell data?
Could a well-hacked phone go promiscuous?

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eli
Both CDMA and GSM phones use encryption by default. It's not the strongest or
best implemented encryption, but it makes it pretty tough. GSM is pretty
tricky to demodulate even without encryption.

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ujjwalg
I am sure iPhone does that too, because as a developer we get crash reports of
our apps. However, I don't think that apple sends this information through
internet, I think it does it when you sync your iPod/iPhone.

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kailoa
The iTunes/iPhone asks your permission before sending crash reports. If the
original article is true, then palm is potentially in for a backlash. This
kind of information transmission should clearly be opt-in.

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brown9-2
The article states that it is covered in the privacy policy.

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calcnerd256
The operative word was "should"

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Devils-Avacado
Google Privacy Invasion alert! Google uses GeoIP to serve location-based
content to you!

