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Comment by fckgw | Hacker News Reader

This article just has little to no information in it, at least not enough to get all up in arms about. Supposedly this nefarious information is sent in the clear but no analysis was done to see what it actually happening? They're just guessing?

The whole article is "Qualcomm privacy policy says they can do xyz" and then extrapolating from there.

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Every time there’s some giant violation of privacy, the rejoinder is “well, it was in the privacy policy, you all agreed to it.” The moral of the story is that we have “to extrapolate from there.”

And they have clever lawyers to write their privacy policies. We don’t, so we have to “round up” in a sense unless we want to be blamed for agreeing to things.

The Qualcomms of the world created this situation, we just have to deal with it.

Also, where in hell is anyone even expected to find the privacy policy of a part of their product? In the box manuals before turning on? By then it's too late. It's not possible to agree to something you're not made aware of.

Agreed, the article is lacking. In some other threads it's come out that this is a GPS sync feature to speed up the time it takes for GPS to get locks. A useful feature to be sure, but IMHO not one that has to be implemented in such a user disrespecting way. It should be a toggleable switch, preferably opt-in. It wouldn't be hard to throw up a dialog on first GPS access that lets the user opt in. As implemented where the user is utterly powerless to stop it, it's an egregious privacy violation.

I am almost sure there is this switch there and in these cases it was set to enabled.

Yes. It is a bit lacking. If I had to guess it would be something to do with the Qualcomm iZat

https://www.qualcomm.com/site/privacy/services

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