Motorola Is Listening 287
New submitter pbritt writes "Ben Lincoln was hooking up to Microsoft ActiveSync at work when he 'made an interesting discovery about the Android phone (a Motorola Droid X2) which [he] was using at the time: it was silently sending a considerable amount of sensitive information to Motorola, and to compound the problem, a great deal of it was over an unencrypted HTTP channel.' He found that photos, passwords, and even data about his home screen config were being sent regularly to Motorola's servers. He has screenshots showing much of the data transmission."
I blame the government (Score:5, Interesting)
I know, that sounds like the lead-in to a joke - but not this time.
In the US, anyway, Congress established quite some time ago that companies had more rights to our personal information than most of us would want them to have. So it's not surprising when we find out the NSA (or whoever) has carte blanche to our information - and also that Congress doesn't grok why we get upset about it.
Europeans ostensibly have much stronger protections in this regard; but it seems to me there's a lot of "wink, wink, nudge nudge" going on over there, and those "protections" are mainly in place so their officials can posture indignantly whenever news like this comes out. In practice I don't think there's much of a difference on either side of the Atlantic.
So what's the big deal about yet another large entity slurping our personal information? Whether they're public or private - according to the folks elected to represent us, we shouldn't be upset about it...
Re:Don't you know... (Score:2, Interesting)
The NSA would like to thank Motorola .
Motorola (cell) in now owned by Google. Shouldn't that be "...would like to thank Google"? Pretty much use to Google doing these kind of shenanigans but I can't help feel that on Slashdot we need to be careful about linking Google and Android to bad things. Only Apple does such things (except it doesn't...the GPS tracking frenzy was a lot of gnashing of teeth for nothing). Remember Apple sells me a device, Google sells me.
Re:Don't you know... (Score:4, Interesting)
Remember Apple sells me a device, Google sells me.
Riiiiight. Apple never spied on anybody [gizmodo.com].
Re:#1 reason to use Android (Score:5, Interesting)
We only use rooted phones running Cyanogenmod 10.1 in our environment. We have a fleet of about 50 smart phones and all of them but about 4 are Google Galaxy Nexus phones. We don't consider anything that we don't control to be secure.
Re:Don't you know... (Score:5, Interesting)
TFA has just been updated saying it's MotoBlur with an automatically created Blur ID - it doesn't even ask you to create an account any more
I guess that was Motorola's way of "removing" MotoBlur from phones - remove the account creation UI, generate the account secretly without any prompting.
Whatever, Motorola deserves to be bankrupted over this. If I was a class-action lawyer I'd be getting in touch with this guy right now.
Does this use my monthly bandwidth? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm wondering if I get charged for this?
Re:Don't you know... (Score:4, Interesting)
Google doesn't sell "you".
Google sees an aggregate or approximation, that may-or-may-not describe you.
Re:#1 reason to use Android (Score:3, Interesting)
Your best bet for installing custom firmware is almost always going to be the current Google dev-phone (previously the Galaxy Nexus, currently the Nexus 4 IIRC) The phone is directly supported by Google and has an unlockable bootloader, no tricky hacks required.