According to a new report published today Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 based smartphones are tracking and sending location data to Redmond’s servers without the owner’s permission.
The report was published by WinRumors which details the investigation Windows Phone 7 hacker and developer Rafael Rivera conducted with various versions (7004, 7390 and 7392) of the mobile Operating System.
Rafael Rivera, famous for his work on jailbreaking Windows Phone 7, has investigated the [unauthorized location tracking] claims thoroughly. After initially labelling the claims “skimpyâ€, Rivera has tested the camera application in Windows Phone 7 to determine whether Microsoft sends device location information to its servers without explicit user confirmation. Rivera explains that packets are sent to agps.location.live.net and several to Microsoft’s Location Inference service hosted at inference.location.live.net.
So basically the camera app wakes up the location service from sleep and caches the user’s location data before it’s given to the camera, so the ends up being cached in Microsoft’s servers. Microsoft issued a statement soon after:
Microsoft is investigating the claims raised in the complaint. We take consumer privacy issues very seriously. Our objective was — and remains — to provide consumers with control over whether and how data used to determine the location of their devices are used, and we designed the Windows Phone operating system with this in mind.
Source: WinRumors
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