Time to come Clean Motorola (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Time to come Clean Motorola (2012)

forums.motorola.com

115 pointspppppo21 comments

Wow. Here are some highlights (these are from Mark, the moderator/Moto employee:

>I take privacy quite seriously. You notice that we use HTTPS on the site because we feel your privacy is important.

>Lastly, I'm saddened by the fact that you didn't abide by the Motorola Feedback Network Non Disclosure agreement you agreed to upon joining the Motorola Feedback Network. Discussing MFN activities outside designated areas is strictly prohibited. Provided this thread excludes MFN related activities here on out it will remain open. Further violation of the NDA will result in closure of this thread. If you(cythrawl) would like to discuss MFN activities further please email me at supportforums@motorola.com.

What! You revealed that we spy on you? That's under NDA!

Hmm, where did I hear similar argument before? Ah, Snowden breaking his employment contract!

I found this statement there...

    "IT IS YOUR PRIVATE INFORMATION... Look at the permissions, they could read pretty much EVERYTHING you do with the phone and track WHERE you was when you did it, and WHO you did it with.. There is NO REASON why its in there, none at all. And last I checked Motorola Corporation was NOT a Government entity, and if it WAS a Government trying to do this very thing the outrage would be extensive (unless you lived in a Country like North Korea)."

The business with the reset count tracking isn't necessarily as creepy as the shovelware/adware apks in the default image, or the serious information leak in activesync in the other Motorola thread.

I'm guessing the firmware update downloader sends some sort of hardware identifier, plus a firmware flash counter, to the update server. This would be the obvious way to prevent re-updating a device that reset itself or was manually reset after a firmware update hosed the system, which would trap the user in a loop. A (device id,firmware revision,reset count) table somewhere in the motosphere isn't exactly PRISM.

Outside a tiny number of hardcore custom ROM tweakers, 21 resets almost certainly indicates some sort of problem.

This makes a whole lot more sense than "We don't want you to get the firmware because you've been naughty"

Resets also often change the android ID that much software uses to identify phones. So resetting may mean you have to opt-in to the beta testing again since it appears you have a different phone from some methods. It's pretty nuts this guy expects everything to work as normal when he reset the thing 21 times over. Resetting even once is a rare thing that many services won't be tested with.

Something not working because he reset actually proves why it is useful for custom support to have data on resets. Not that I would expect any hardware use data to be protected if I opted into a beta testing program. The whole point of that is to see how the hardware handles beta software.

Often with these programs the updates are just sent out at a certain time, so it's entirely possible to just miss the update period. Heck, I've seen that done with production updates, let alone beta ones. A friend with a Droid from Google IO didn't turn it on for a couple years, missed an update which was no longer available, and missed the termination of the free service to boot.

Mark explained it.

>Upon turning on the phone and registering it on the network you must agree to the EULA. The only difference between your phone and a MOTOBLUR device is that you don't have a user created login. A random login is created for you to optimize the setup experience. If you don't connect any social networking applications your phone doesn't connect with our servers.

It involves a hardware ID, and a profile that is created when the device is initially synced. It may also send a "firmware flash counter" but it wouldn't be necessary.

But the OP said he was using cyanogenmod before, is he claiming that the hardware phones home even when he's not using the motorola firmware?

I don't think so. I think his claim was that the hardware phones home under the Motorola firmware, and that the EULA hadn't spelled that out clearly, and that Motorola had not been as forthright as they should or that they may even have been deceptive.

The scariest part of this thread is the responses from the user 'Poko' a little bit further down. Go ahead an read them — I'm still not sure if that's an astroturf account or not.

Do you have a screenshot? Looks like it has been deleted.

Edit: Oops. Never mind, you meant a user on Motorola's website. Please disregard this comment everyone.

Now that Motorola is owned by Google, I wonder what Google has to say about this?

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," Schmidt. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/07/schmidt_on_privacy/

Every time I read that claim I feel like sharing this article: "Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’" https://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/12...

Thanks. Just for the record, don't be thinking I agree with that statement. I consider it among the creepier quotes Schmidt has produced, and he has a great selection to choose from.

http://www.stateofsearch.com/top-15-of-eric-schmidts-remarka...

Hmmm scary and it doesn't even get the best one:

"Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it," he said. Google implants, he added, probably crosses that line.[1]

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/10/google...

Apply that logic to passwords, which are being sent in plain text here. By his logic, you should have no password protected data, lest anyone know about it. Strictly he's correct: it's stupid to assume anything will remain secret, particularly if you don't keep it to yourself. Schmidt, motorola, google, public wifi, can they keep secrets?

It's also funny how upset he feels when the shoe is on the other foot, as lampooned by this slashdot poster: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3645419&cid=4344175...

Yes he said that, but it was immediately followed by his actual point which was that in the United States your communications are not secure.

"But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And [...] we're all subject, in the US, to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/07/google-ceo-on-priva...

The wider internet community needs to know about this.

I didn't even know that they were dirty.

*Time to come clean, Motorola

Wow!

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