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.

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

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.

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.

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.

As mentioned in the comments on that page, this is a different issue. You can opt out of sending the information to Google, but you have no say in the matter regarding Palm.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

A few meters is the absolute best case.

In a city, you've got to deal with buildings and structures. Outside a city, you often have to make do with fewer than 3 visible signals.

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?

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...)

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 :)

> 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.

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?

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.

Just like how AOL was collecting statistics and decided to release them "anonymously". But that didn't work out so well.

Don't you trust our mother corporations?

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.

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.

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

The operative word was "should"

The Kindle does it too, and yet as far as I can tell there's been almost no outrage.

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