Windows phones send user location to Microsoft
All there in the fine print
Add Microsoft Windows Phone 7 to the list of mobile operating systems that silently transmit the precise physical location of the device back to a central database.
CNET reported the location tracking on Monday, almost a week after reports of similar tracking in Apple's iPhone and Google's Android mobile OS raised concerns that smartphones could be used by police, civil litigants, or abusive spouses to track an owner's movements over extended periods of time.
Microsoft has said here that when location services for Windows phones are switched on, the devices transmit a unique ID along with nearby wireless networks, their signal strength, and GPS-extracted location to the company's servers.
Windows phones don't store any of the locations on the device itself. By contrast, iPhone 4 stores locations in an easy-to-read file that can store months, and potentially years, worth of data that police have been tapping for years. Android indexes locations of cellphone towers and Wi-Fi networks the handset has connected to, but limits entries to 200 and 50 respectively.
Both Apple and Google have said their phones report their location, but only when the devices' location services are turned on, in keeping with previous disclosures. Neither Apple nor Google has disclosed that location information is also stored on the handset.
A Microsoft spokeswoman declined to make anyone from the company available to speak about the practice. ®
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COMMENTS
It's all about "marketing".
This entire atrocious abuse of privacy is marketers looking to push so-called "appropriate" advertising on people who don't need, nor want, the marketards opinion on whatever tat they are pushing.
Face it, marketards, you are now hated roughly as much as lawyers & politicians.
Electronic Tag
So, anyone with one of these "smart" phones is voluntarily carrying around somrthing that is more or less equivalent to a a court assigned electronic tag.
Sealed law
I had suspected this from the beginning. If a law had been drafted that required everybody to carry a tracking device, the civil liberties people would have been up in arms immediately. Solution? Simple. Disguise the tracking device by adding various secondary functions e.g. telephone services, emphasize those secondary functions in the marketing spiel and bury the primary function in the small print. People will buy the device for the secondary functions alone and forget about - or not even ralise - the primary purpose of the device.
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