Just when I thought Palm was about to regain the stock back in the smart phone industry with the release of it’s Pre, I was corrected by a post from Joey Hess on how Palm has been sneaking behind my back and collecting my personal data, including names of installed apps, application usage (and crashes), as well as GPS coordinates (!)

I will say that the Pre is one of the better phones I’ve had so far, and believe me, I’ve owned plenty.  I always thought that if Palm plays it’s cards right, it can give the iPhone the run for it’s money. This move, however, is far from good IMO.

Now, more on the issue: In addition to Joey’s findings, I can see the status of the data upload in the file /tmp/uploadd-upload-response

root@castle:/tmp# cat uploadd-upload-response
cat uploadd-upload-response
HTTP/1.1 100 Continue

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Content-Type: text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:54:36 GMT
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: Keep-alive

A Servlet

File was uploaded successfully.
ID:RDX-32350843

Update:Engadget adds some more light to this event and states that the shipping of the personal data is somehow related to using Google and it’s unclear if Palm is simply piping the data to them, among other things. Either way, I’m pretty confident that I didn’t allow anyone — Google, Palm or anyone else — to be sucking data without my consent. I realize that the Palm profile lives elsewhere, but it only backs up data that *I* know about. I’m sure it doesn’t record my GPS coordinates.