How To "Turn Off" Privacy Settings On Palm Pre; No More Phoning Home
Palm clarified its stance by saying "Palm takes privacy very seriously, and offers users ways to turn data collecting services on and off." In that we have two ways to protect your privacy below. Although it was made clear in the This "feature" by the way also drains your battery faster.
EVERYDAY USER SOLUTION
Palm has made us aware of how to TURN OFF the location tracker. Under Preferences, to go Location Services, a user needs only to switch Background Data Collection to the OFF slider and your location and application data will not be sent to Palm.
ROOTING SOLUTION (Command Line)
If are you command line friendly, then this is your choice. Comment out the 'exec' line in /etc/event.d/uploadd and reboot. After rebooting, you'll notice the contextupload process is still running. This is started by dbus, so disable it by: rm /usr/bin/contextupload.
Tony Peric
Philip Contacted Joey Hess who reported the original article regarding the data collection:
Is an ID attached to the data that is being send?
I did not see one, but I have not looked at the traffic sent over the wire; an ID could be sent at connection time. Also, the data is sent to the same server that the Pre uses to back up your personal data (if that is enabled).
Will turning off "Background Data Collection" From the Location Services Utility, stop the data Collection?
No, I have had that turned off since the first day, doesn't help.
Turning off the GPS entirely on the same screen is reported to stop GPS data collection, though the other data is still sent. Of course, completly disabling the GPS cripples other features.
So data collection is still happening. We will contact Palm and find out what they are going to do about this situation.
Data Mining, Data Tracking, Location Tracking, Pallm, Palm Pre, WebOS | Permalink 
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Reader Comments (4)
Frankly this tracking doesn't bother me at all. For instance, I notice when I travel, and I pull up Sprint navigator and search for airports, the Pre knows where I am without me having to enter any more details on which airport I am searching for. Items like that are a real time saver.
That's a bit troubling. Also the NASCAR etc software I can seem to remove either.
People are blowing this way out of proportion. I'm pretty darn sure NONE of this information is identifying, and the app data sent to Palm is meant for daily back-up purposes. Sheesh people that are so freaked out about this without even knowing how to shut off the locating services are so dumb they should just get an iPhone and be done with it!
IS there ANY benefit to the user to leave this turned on?