When Debian developer Joey Hess started tinkering with webOS, he noticed that it was sending something to Palm once a day. Surely, Palm wasn’t sending anything too potentially incriminating without making it blatantly obvious to the user, right? Wrong.

Joey tore apart the data the Pre was transmitting, and there it was, smack dab at the top of the page:

{ “errorCode”: 0, “timestamp”: 1249855555954.000000, “latitude”: 36.594108, “longitude”: -82.183260, “horizAccuracy”: 2523, “heading”: 0, “velocity”: 0, “altitude”: 0, “vertAccuracy”: 0 }

That was Joey’s position at the time the data was sent, accurate to the same degree that the Google Maps application was.

Also included was a list of every application Joey used, along with how long they were used for (as measured by “launch” and “close” parameters), along with crashlogs. Last but very much not least, it also sent a manifest file of all applications installed on the phone - including third-party applications not authorized by Palm. All of this data is sent to ps.palmws.com.