Thursday 13 August 2009

data in your palm

So I have been distracted by real life getting in the way of doing much apart from playing with facebook - a useful tool for family togetherness. Then I started noticing various things popping up in the news that I wanted to make a note of for future reference, so thought this could be a place to do that. Today I just read on the BBC website about the Palm Smartphone, which was sending user data back to Palm on a daily basis, without the user realising.
The article quotes a Palm spokesperson:
"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........ We appreciate the trust that users give us with their information, and have no intention to violate that trust."
So perhaps the smartphone shouldn't set up to send back private data as the default option?