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Lumia phones are leaking private information to US-servers

10 points by pasiaj ↗ HN
The biggest Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat is reporting that Lumia phones are sending sensitive information to Microsoft servers in the US.

http://www.hs.fi/sunnuntai/Nokian+Lumia-puhelin+vuotaa+tietoja+ulkomaille/a1393046974949

On the 14th of July 2014 the Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority (FICORA) send an official inquiry to Nokia, asking them to confirm that no "confidential communitacions, positional information or other private information is revealed to third parties without the users' permission".

Nokia did not answer the inquiry.

FICORA met with Nokia in August to discuss what kind of confirmation they could give. They agreed upon that answer that Nokia is unaware of any hardware functionality added during the manufacturing process that would allow private information to leak to third parties.

Other magazines in Finland are specifying that the Windows Phone OS is sending, by default, "the position information, text massages, contacts and web browser usage information" to Microsoft servers.

2 comments

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pedalpete
I've got an Android, an iPhone (and a Windows Phone arriving tomorrow), I assumed that both of these were already sending location and web browser usage stats to Google and Apple servers.

I think Microsoft does a pretty good version of outlining their data collection in easy to understand terms http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/legal/wp8/windows-phone-pr..., I just hope they aren't collecting more than they say they are.

pasiaj
Here's an other article from HS detailing the data that is sent to US-based servers.

http://www.hs.fi/sunnuntai/HSn+testiss%C3%A4+Lumia+otti+yhte...

All an all, the content seems aimed to people who do not understand the realities of modern computing. Things proxies, cloud services etc. or the phone communicating with servers even when you're not doing anything with it.

Using the default settings, web browsing (or at least DNS-queries) is proxied through the United States. Also the Nokia Maps & navigation services are sending your location information to "foreign servers".

It also says "Lumia can save photos and text messages to a Microsoft cloud service".