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Palm denies Pre breaches privacy

Palm Pre smartphones have been sending back the location details of their owners daily to the company.

By Asavin Wattanajantra, 13 Aug 2009 at 12:30

Palm has said that there is nothing “beyond the norm” with its eagerly awaited smartphone sending information such as a user’s location back to its headquarters daily.

Concerns were raised after software developer and Palm Pre owner Joey Hess discovered that his device’s WebOS periodically uploaded information to the company, such as his GPS location and how long an app was being used for.

As he explained in a blog post, a user granted the firm the right to collect this information by agreeing to Palm's Terms and Conditions.

However, according to the Register, Hess was concerned that this information was sent back on daily basis, with a suggestion that this could be a risk to privacy.

Palm said in a statement: “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 towards a goal of offering a great user experience."

“We appreciate the trust that users give us with their information, and have no intention to violate that trust,” it added.

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1 comments

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So what's new?

By their nature cellphones constantly update carriers with your approximate location (i.e. GSM triangulation), and unless you're even only slightly savvy, surfing the web can reveal a lot more personal information about you. Credit and loyalty card companies can devise your "profiles", and CCTV probably captures you several times a day. Some people even voluntarily broadcast their "private" lives on Facebook/Twitter/Big Brother/etc... One school of thought is that the issue shouldn't be about secreting what "private" information is available about us, but making sure that anyone that has access to it uses it in an ethically responsible way (even if they don't actually do anything with it), and that regulation is put in place to enforces this trust. http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConBlogEntry.959

By Gadgeteer on Friday Aug 14

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