Palm and Pre-Spying
August 17th, 2009, 7:02pm by JakeLeft this as a comment on the Palm blog. For posterity, in case it’s not published.
This has me really ticked off. I don’t care whether you publish this comment, I just want you to read it. I am a HUGE Pre evangelist, I lined up on June 6. I love the Pre. My friends make fun of me for my overbearing Pre salesmanship. I’ve talked them up at the Sprint store to prospective customers.
And I gave you the benefit of the doubt w/ the spying story. I already knew that the phone company tracks my location, so that didn’t bother me terribly (it did a little). But the additional data the phone sends back– including what applications I use & when– is private data and Palm has no right to it.
Now you make pains to point out how the data is allegedly “anonymized,” but no data is really anonymous. If you know where the phone is every night, it’s not really hard to figure out who has the phone! So please, don’t insult the intelligence of your customers with such nonsense.
For the GPS data, you claim we can turn this off. Yes, and then we can’t use GPS with any applications– that would cripple the phone. So your solution for people that don’t like the GPS tracking is to disable one of the best features of the Pre. There goes a giant selling point.
For the applications– well, you say we’ve “agreed” to it when we bought the Pre. Nice fine print. I didn’t see it, but I’ll take you at your word now. Just know that if I ever recommend the Pre to anyone, I will preface it by pointing out that Palm constantly tracks how you use your phone. What will you do with that data? I have no idea, but I don’t trust you not to sell it or hand it out.
So no Palm, this is not acceptable. I was withholding judgment until you had a response, and your response made me furious. I have owned a Treo 600, 700P and Centro, and a T3, III and IIIe. I am a long-term Palm shareholder. I blog about how great the Pre is, I started the biggest Flickr group for it, I listen to the Palmcast every week. And until you change that policy, I won’t even consider recommending the Pre. This makes me sad, because the Pre is a great device, the WebOS is a great platform and with Mojo I was looking forward to some great apps. But as customers– especially those most tech-savvy– flee Palm, the developers will dwindle too and you’ll be right back to where you were a year or two ago.
Don’t screw this up Palm. You’ve made the best phone on the market, and you’re trying to sabotage it. I’ll bite my tongue a few more days, but you should know that the the Palm community is pissed about this and the flood is about to be unleashed with these arrogant comments.
Until then, I’ll tell my friends to buy a Pre if they want Palm to know where they are at all times, and to keep track of their minute-by-minute usage of their phones. This is spyware at its worst, and it might kill your company if you don’t fix it.
August 18th, 2009 at 1:46 am
Nothing? Not even one post telling me I’m naive?
I really didn’t mind too much last week, but the flippant response today really infuriated me for some reason. As noted elsewhere, Sprint tracks all sorts of data already, as does Verizon– websites visited and so on. But as telecom providers, they have to comply with laws specifically geared towards them in regards to data privacy. Not sure if those would apply with Palm.
And it does creep me out that Palm phones home about every app I’m using, and for how long. That’s getting into my head even more. The quote, “users are informed about this policy and agree to it before using their Palm Pre,” basically is their way of saying, “if you don’t like our privacy policy, then don’t buy our device.” That’s customer-hostile behavior and not something Palm can get away with at this point. I’m mad as much as an investor as I am as a user.
I mean, how big would the global freak-out be if Microsoft kept track of every program you used throughout the day. People flipped out when iTunes Genius was on by default, and Apple knew what songs you had on your computer!
Maybe I’m completely wrong, but I think this is a PR disaster, and one Palm can ill afford while working to gain their foothold in the marketplace. I can’t even fathom how the pluses could possibly outweigh the minuses.
August 18th, 2009 at 8:29 am
I haven’t been following the brouhaha that closely. Maybe I’m the naive one, but I just assumed that most of the data is necessarily transferred in the course of the daily backup. Certainly paints the “my phone can read my mind,” ads in a new light. It’s certainly worrisome if Palm can track whether you’ve installed a tethering app…
Anyway, if you think you can reduce your comments to 140 chars, Palm’s PR honcho is @foxycar on twitter. She’s had a spirited exchange with @jimgoldman, who wrote the cnbc article.
August 18th, 2009 at 10:28 am
Has this been getting any traction outside the engadget-reading population? From what I can tell, it’s like the App Store stuff with Apple — those of us who are really into it care, but the general public doesn’t really get what the big deal is. Or at least, they don’t seem to want to be bothered.
August 19th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Seems even Pyslent has become bored with this story…
August 20th, 2009 at 11:11 am
Kelvin clued me into the Pinch Media spyware application attached to many iPhone applications. Sounds as bad or worse than the Pre. How do you even now if you have a Pinch-enabled app installed?
Further reading.
August 20th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
A quick web search shows that this isn’t a new discovery, though I hadn’t heard about it before. Apparently it was posted as early as March, if not before, here.
I’m really no more worried about Pinch Media than about the Pre stuff — that is to say, I’m not worried about either, personally. However, at least with iPhone/Pinch:
(a) Phoning home is not built into the OS (as far as we know). I think this is a big difference — people should get mad at Pinch Media, or Palm, if at anyone.
(b) You have to download a Pinch-enabled app, and then there’s an opt-in for the location services (which, granted, may be tied to the functionality of the app). If you don’t want a fart app to know your location, you can say no.
(c) Pinch’s response was quicker and more upfront about what they’re doing than Palm’s.
This may be shocking, but everybody who runs Google Analytics does so without telling web users that much of the same information is being collected — where they are located, what hardware/software they’re using, what pages they look at, etc. It’s hard for me to get all that bent out of shape about this.
There is a site if you’re interested in following the community effort to track which iPhone apps have been identified as having Pinch in them.