The discovery was made by software developer and Pre owner Joey Hess, who found that his phone was reporting his location over a secure connection back to Palm. It also sent back information about application crashes - even those not seen by a Pre owner.
Also in the daily update sent to Palm was a list of the third party applications installed on the phone.
In its privacy policy, Palm does explain that it will gather geographical data to help with location-based services. However, commentators were puzzled as to why it needed to gather so much data and why owners were not told about what it had gathered.
Mr Hess found a way to disable the reporting by editing the phone's software.
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