Lawsuit Claims Windows Phone 7 Spies On Users 136
jfruhlinger writes "Microsoft wants to emulate the success of the iPhone, but they probably didn't want to follow in Apple's footsteps this way: a class action lawsuit claims that Windows Phone 7 is collecting location data on users, even when they request that it stop. But a look at the internals shows that Microsoft might not be acting as Big Brother-ish as it appears."
Really? (Score:4, Funny)
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Can you spot the bitter Windows Phone developer? Look carefully. They may look like an Android or iPhone developer, but if you approach them slowly and flip them over quickly you can identify them by their long umbilical cord stretching back to MSDN colony mother.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
Can you spot the bitter Windows Phone developer? Look carefully. They may look like an Android or iPhone developer, but if you approach them slowly and flip them over quickly you can identify them by their long umbilical cord stretching back to MSDN colony mother.
I don't develop for any phone. I can tell you that the most obvious, least clever, most repetitive, least novel jokes constantly get rewarded with a +5 visibility around here. And naturally if you don't think this is the epitome of humor, if you want something better like original creative humor that makes you laugh instead of making you roll your eyes, you either "don't get the joke" or you're "from the enemy tribe", in this case that would be MSDN. It's sort of like watching robots increment their humor variable.
If I had to sum it up with a single word, the word that comes to mind is "circlejerk". It's some kind of circle or feedback cycle. Repetition branded as "humor" gets rewarded here so as a result we get more of it. Maybe this is what trolls with mod points do when they run out of GNAA posts, like a very subtle kind of crapflood. If so, I salute their cleverness and the effectiveness of the tactic. Unlike the pro-lifers who murder doctors or the politicians who come up with new restrictions for the "land of the free", I do have a sense of irony, so you could regard this post as me having taken the bait if you like.
Occasionally I'll see a joke here that's not a repetitive meme and wasn't trivially predictable. Even more occasionally they get modded up. I think they're the only reason I don't configure this account to display "+5 Funny" as "-1". Well, that and I browse at -1 so it'd make no material difference.
Anyway, I'll make at least a feeble effort to remain on-topic. I think this lawsuit is great. If anything that even looks like perhaps it might possibly be unsolicited tracking/spying/etc results in tons of legal headaches for the companies involved, this can only be a good thing. I hope it makes them afraid to do anything that even looks like it might invade privacy. I would call that a better world.
If that's the only way to get companies to start respecting their customers, that's a shame but I consider that their choice. They want to do it the hard way, so be it. They could have done it voluntarily, out of respect, but force (i.e. of law) is the only thing they seem to understand. Finally the lust for money and status of the trial attorneys can be put to good use.
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No company has shown more contempt for its customers than MS, but yet they retain lots of masochistic geeky love.
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No company has shown more contempt for its customers than MS
My personal internally-consistent solution to that is simple. I have a Microsoft keyboard about which I have no complaints. Other than that, I haven't used a product of theirs in over ten years.
but yet they retain lots of masochistic geeky love.
The thing about repeatedly bashing your head against a wall is that it feels so good when you stop. If you have sense enough to stop and realize that there are alternatives...
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No company has shown more contempt for its customers than MS
You don't get around much do you?
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No company has shown more contempt for its customers than MS
You don't get around much do you?
You don't look around much, do you?
That wasn't my line. I was quoting the person to whom I was responding. I failed to make that more clear because I didn't properly close the quote tags. 'Tis what happens sometimes when I'm inebriated and it's late at night...
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I don't think anybody *likes* Microsoft. The closest thing they get to "love" is when people settle for MS products when they have other options (and half the time, it's just because they don't know they have other options).
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If I had to sum it up with a single word, the word that comes to mind is "circlejerk".
Isn't that the basis of all peer bonding? Find a low common denominator and repeat it ad infinitum?
Why would slashdot be any different in that respect? We talk about Windows vs. Mac instead of Ford vs. Chevy, Bud vs. Miller, Redsox vs. Cowboys ... but it's all the same thing underneath.
At least slashdotters don't use "gay" or "faggot" in every sentence. Give them that much.
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If I had to sum it up with a single word, the word that comes to mind is "circlejerk".
Isn't that the basis of all peer bonding? Find a low common denominator and repeat it ad infinitum?
Why would slashdot be any different in that respect? We talk about Windows vs. Mac instead of Ford vs. Chevy, Bud vs. Miller, Redsox vs. Cowboys ... but it's all the same thing underneath.
At least slashdotters don't use "gay" or "faggot" in every sentence. Give them that much.
If by "peer bonding" you mean "superficial contact with people who will forever remain strangers" then ok. Honestly I don't see the point.
I question the desire for this kind of thing and how healthy it is. I really doubt someone with a healthy offline social life needs to come here and repeat MS jokes ad nauseum to feel "bonded" to something.
But then, to be honest with you, most of the things that most people do most of the time make no goddamned sense to me whatsoever. Particularly when they insis
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For all the cries of circlejerk there are a lot of whiny "you nerds hurt my feelings" posts by people who apparently are above the whole thing.
If you really don't like it here, please don't ever come back. Go away. But of course, you're a troll so we're "blessed" with you.
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tl;dr
Then my advice is: don't read it.
You're welcome.
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Sadly for MS, the number of people who have made that joke outnumber Windows Phone 7 owners 100:1 at least.
I thought... (Score:3, Insightful)
...that the "7" in Windows Phone 7 referred to the number of users?
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Well, they are ashamed at being tricked into thinking they were getting iPhone 4's at the AT&T store...
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Number of mortal sins?
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Whereas calling someone an "ifag" is the pinnacle of fresh, original comedy.
This is why you use a Blackberry. (Score:1)
Cough, choke, spit.... (Score:2)
What part of this article was about security? What kind of security are you talking about?
Blackberry is a Java based phone. If you find ANY opening in it that would allow you to alter the class loader code, it's all tits to the wind after that. You could insert viruses all over that. Oh and given the crap quality of the app store, it seems like it's probably REALLY easy to get an app on the device w
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Blackberry benefits from marketing and obscurity causing people to *think* its secure, just look at the comments made by the guy who successfully exploited a blackberry in the recent pwn2own contest.
Windows phone 7 likely benefits from the same obscurity at the moment...
iPhone is more of a target right now because they're desirable handsets, whereas windows phone 7 is largely undesirable and blackberry is considered boring and unfashionable, being associated with business and in some cases kids (who only us
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You sound like gp personally insulted you. He didn't. . For the record, in over a decade no such hole has been found - the closest example was a quickly patched exploit in the non-java webkit browser. Considering the historical and current userbase size for of bb device, you can be sure that it's not for lack of trying.
As far as malicious apps - well yeah. It's trivially easy to do that on any patform,because then you're exploiti g the user and not the platform. In order for a platform to be useful, it m
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As for the lack of trying issue here... let's say that I would never consider a hacker a threat that tries to do anything other than using the weakest link in security.
I did take offense to the GP... for years I've been complaining about people making ridiculous false statements about security based on stupid little things like "Well, no one ha
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Yeah those blackberries you can pwn by serving them a malformed image through the browser. Those blackberries that are wiretapped by half the governments on the planet.
They're very secure on paper, I'll give them that.
Re:Simpler answer... (Score:4, Informative)
The towers track you by necessity, the phone itself doesn't need to do anything special and even old dumb phones can be tracked in this way.
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The former part about cell-tower tracking... Yes. it sort of has to to properly hand over control to the next tower when you're moving.
The latter? I doubt it. Otherwise, opening a maps app would instantly have your correct location(versus having to wait and get a gps lock), and that doesn't seem to happen, at least on Android.
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Cell tower tracking can get you your correct location-- you dont need GPS for that, and Google maps (at least on blackberry-- which has gps) uses cell tower triangulation.
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All because you picked your carrier based on the phone. Dude. It's a phone. Use au or docomo if you want service. You can use your iphone on docomo, just switch the sim card, or, get an android from au and have coverage everywhere, even in the middle of nowhere.
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Wow you call 911 a lot if you're experienced in the geolocation capabilities of your newest phone. I've never called 911 in my life. If you add up all the times my immediate family has called 911, it's probably about 4, and in all of those incidents it was calling the police to an incident as an onlooker.
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Microsoft Like An Abusive Spouse (Score:3, Funny)
Bet the same people invested heavily in Silverlight...
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what friggin phone can you use swing with? none.
eswt on the other hand, that at least you can use on a few phones.
java on the other hand, with whatever ui kits, you can use on many, many phones. but that's not the point. point with wp7 is being constrained to a feature phone like development, even windows ce mobiles were more interesting from developer perspective.
but that wouldn't be so bad either, except that it's coupled to being really feature phone like in the sense that your threads get killed no matt
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They all do it! (Score:2)
If you don't like it, don't use 'em.
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That's a fair point, but Cyanogenmod offers better security. Some apps will FC if you restrict their permissions, but it's an option.
that's not ENTIRELY true :) (Score:2)
(htc, google, and amazon iirc)
For now, I've set the offending dirs to read-only so no files are written, and all's well, but I don't think reading the
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1 Hour? I think you're being hugely optimistic and don't commute in public transport (Unless is insanely fast where you live).
Also, a computer with internet access does not equal to YOUR OWN device with internet access.
Disclaimer: I do not live in USA.
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Or you commute using underground or high speed public transport, where mobile signals are useless anyway...
Re:They all do it! (Score:4, Insightful)
Smartphone, dumbphone, anyphone - if it's connected, SOMEONE (OS vendor, Carrier, Sowtware) is logging activity & location. At a minimum the cell signal is triangulated to get your location. "to provide better service" meh.
If you don't like it, don't use 'em.
Umm. Yes, the phone company has to know where you are. Now please explain why the folks who made the phone need to know?
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Umm. Yes, the phone company has to know where you are. Now please explain why the folks who made the phone need to know?
Probably because they are the ones you go to when you lose your phone and want to use their service to find it, pretty hard for them to do that if they don't know where it is hmmm?
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Hahaha how many mobile OS companies offer this service?
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Hahaha how many mobile OS companies offer this service?
Why does that matter? If they offer that service then obviously they need that location, how hard is that to understand?
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My point was that none of these providers (as far as I can tell) offer this service out of the box - but they all collect location data out of the box.
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My point was that none of these providers (as far as I can tell) offer this service out of the box - but they all collect location data out of the box.
Given that WP7 is the context of this story i would have thought that would be the first place you would look, and if you did look then you didn't look very hard.
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Apparently they only do this if you sign up for their tracking service:
https://support.apple.com/kb/ht2526 [apple.com]
The OS does this by default. Explain?
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Apparently they only do this if you sign up for their tracking service:
https://support.apple.com/kb/ht2526 [apple.com]
The OS does this by default. Explain?
Wish I could mod ya up on this one. You have a VERY good point.
I posted a comment related to tracking abilities but what you posted actually brings up a separate issue (through logical jump) - authorization. People like to use apps (duh), but these devices, operating systems, apps, providers, everything, have legal disclaimers and notifications. Only a small percentage of people read it.
Why is there so much complaint when the providers do something the person has authorized already, on the large cover-al
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Try an experiment:
turn your phone off (off, off) when you are travelling somewhere.
When you reach where ever, turn your phone on and attempt to find something around you. How long does it take?
Look at some over your other 'location dependent' apps, and try the same thing. Notice taking pictures takes longer?
Tempest in a teapot, and as much as I'd like to jump to the defence of those poor 7 windows phone users, there is likely nothing nefarious here.
confused (Score:2)
I'm not - the ipod touch (no gps, no cell) had/has the same tracking issues. If the phone didn't cache 'what is local', it would have to reload its info every time, which is slow and would yield a bunch of weenies whining "my iphone is killing my data plan". Unfortunately, part of caching is tracking - from reversing the age of the cached locations, I can effectively track you.
The appearance problem is maintaining the tracking explicitly. If I delete the explicit track, I can infer most of the informa
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At a minimum the cell signal is triangulated to get your location. "to provide better service" meh.
Not in this case, this particular data set is being kept away from the carriers, and was only being sent to Microsoft Servers.
If you don't like it, don't use 'em.
Or we could just sue for them lying to us. Personally, I don't mind them collecting the data. It's the lying about it that bothers me. And if you live in the US, and don't like other people suing, you could just move away.
anyone would be a fool to trust (Score:2)
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For some reason, you linked to the article on Kleptocracy. The article for Corporatocracy [wikipedia.org] is here. Personally, I think of the United States as more of an Oligarchy [wikipedia.org].
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gps satelites know where you are (Score:1)
What's he testing (Score:4, Interesting)
Is he testing Windows Mobile or Windows Phone 7? I RTFA and the linked articles and can't seem to find the testing methodology or any documentation.
And wouldn't you want that accurate location information to be sent if you were using the Find My Phone thing (just like you would with Apple's Find My iPhone):
Microsoft's "Find My Phone," meanwhile, only keeps the device's most recent location, the company said.
Of course you have to trust that the company is only keeping the most recent location but that's the case with all providers.
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...
Of course you have to trust that the company is only keeping the most recent location but that's the case with all providers.
Hear, hear. You're dead-on. I listen to the police radio traffic where I live and actually got to hear a dispatch the other night where they were actively using it over the radio (the dispatcher was communicating with the mobile provider over the phone).
Anyone wanna know how they do it? First, there's GPS that makes it more specific and easy to find your location, but if you disable that they use triangulation (Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_tracking [wikipedia.org])
So really it's a dead-middle point (
Bad Summary (Score:1)
"Follow in Apple's footsteps"? If you want to compare them to someone, pick Google, the biggest privacy violator in this market. Even after Apple stopped crowdsourcing location information, Google is still using it to track Android users. There is a reason they spend millions of dollars to develop Android, and it's not benevolent.
I guess I shouldn't expect more from the /. crowd. You guys still believe the "Don't Be Evil" line from 10 years ago.
I'd be surprised if this was intentional (Score:4, Interesting)
I've had a Windows Phone 7 device since day one, and it asks at every turn before doing something that would collect location (or any other) data. If it's true and not just a misconfigured device or data being poorly interpreted, I'd be surprised if it was intentional.
But, I know I know. Always assume the worst yada yada. Microsoft is evil, right?
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No it's sends location data ALWAYS (Score:1)
It asks you if its ok to send the data, then it sends the data anyway with a flag saying not to use it.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20057329-281.html
"Windows Phone 7, supported by manufacturers including Dell, HTC, LG, Nokia, and Samsung, transmits to Microsoft a miniature data dump including a unique device ID, details about nearby Wi-Fi networks, and the phone's GPS-derived exact latitude and longitude."
"Microsoft says that in the case of Windows Phone 7, location information is transmitted to its se
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"Microsoft says that in the case of Windows Phone 7, location information is transmitted to its servers only if Wi-Fi and location services are turned on. It also points out it offers a global switch to turn off all location-based services"
So if you have WiFi on and GPS on, then it's sending your location details to Microsoft HQ with or without your permission.
Are you hard of reading? Or just plain retarded? If you turn off location-based services you no longer grant permission and it no longer transmits location data, very simple.
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And, pray tell, how would that work, exactly? Perhaps the entire database should be downloaded to the device, and it could run the queries against the data locally and never releveal its location?
The question "Which is the closest restaurant?" is hard to answer if you refuse to tell me where you are.
Re:Evil (Score:1)
But, I know I know. Always assume the worst yada yada. Microsoft is evil, right?
Not necessarily. But without a complete set of facts one must make an assumption. An assumption is based on what we know and what is likely to have happened. What I know as a non-WP7 users is that Microsoft is being sued, that Microsoft is supposedly spying on consumers, that they are competitors to a company who make it their business to spy on consumers, and that the way they treat their users typically is nothing short of contempt.
The logical assumption is yes, Microsoft is evil and is spying. If this is
Re:Evil (Score:4, Insightful)
No, without a complete set of facts, you go looking for a complete set of facts. Making assumptions is what everybody expects you to do, and it leads to people only feeding you partial information in an attempt to guide you towards a specific assumption.
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Unfortunately unless you work as a programmer for Microsoft's WP7's customer data stealing department you can never truly get a complete set of facts. There are assumptions and trusting others involved in every step of the way.
Sure with more facts the assumptions are lower, but don't pretend you don't make one, even if the only assumption you make is that the person who has all the facts is telling you the truth.
Plus I have better things to do then investigative journalism for every Microsoft is Evil (tm) c
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Nice. That way, there is no way of ever proving you wrong, is there?
Plus I have better things to do then investigative journalism for every Microsoft is Evil (tm) case I hear about. Making certain assumptions is the sensible thing to do.
It's not the sensible thing to do. It just
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Windows Phone 7 is Great! (Score:1, Insightful)
Kiss my ass WP7 is great. So what if it they log your location, every other freaking device is subject to the same shit. I for one am sick of this bash Microsoft all the time around here on slashdot almost makes it not worth reading the cruf posted on this site anymore.
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Slashdot aren't the ones lodging the lawsuit, you know.
Goodness (Score:1)
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Apple wasn't collecting users' actual location; they were collecting the cell towers they were near. Beyond that, it was a bug that, when reported, was fixed within days. Heaven forbid someone just tell Apple (or whatever company) that they have a bug, so not scare people over nothing.
Actually, the problem was that people don't have brains and get all excited. Apple couldn't read the information that was found stored on iPhones, so Apple couldn't use this information to track a user. And if someone wanted to find your location with this data, they first had to steal the phone from your pocket. In which case they know where the phone is anyway. But where common sense broke down completely was that all these idiots didn't realise that the information stored on the iPhone arrived there beca
*sigh* (Score:1)
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Everything that gets released with public 'net access are found to have some piece(s) of software/hardware that 'violate privacy'.
In the end, some say, "it sure is and I can prove it" and others say, "it actually isn't and there are ways to see clearly that it isn't true."
Actually, I'm glad that this is being posted so hardcore geeks have a chance to test it and see what the end results are (basically acquire more data).
Eh, it will repeat itself in a different way a little after the du
It's gonna happen regardless (Score:1)
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Acutally, uh... Yeah. :)
There be money in them there heavily-used personal devices with difficult-to-monitor mobile 'net access! /accent