Your Palm Pre is watching you

If you are freaked out by the idea of electronics privacy invasion, this might make you scream: Palm Pre developer Joey Hess says that the Palm Pre uploads information to Palm daily, including: your location, the apps that you have used and the time that they were in use, app crash logs, the list of installed apps.

While the location part would the most troubling to many (it is!), you would think that Palm would ask your at least once if you want to participate in some kind of anonymous (is it?) data gathering to improve the service. come on, even Microsoft does it. Palm doesn’t seem to be doing anything illegal and all this is probably in their terms of use (we should read it, but who does?).

In the end, Palm should at least provide a way to opt-out, or to check what was sent and when. I don’t think that their goal is to “spy” on their users, but it would be appropriate to properly warn users about this sensitive subject.