I just had an inquiry from a new Treo owner who is looking his gift horse in the mouth:
My employer recently gave each of the salespeople a new Treo 650. None of us requested it, in fact, a year ago we told management we didn’t want them. Now we have them and can’t figure out why. Our business is not dealing with life or death and we don’t send a lot of emails. We carried cell phones before, and laptops too.
One thought (suspicion) is perhaps they got them for us so they could track us. Without asking them, is there a way we can determine if our Treos are being used for such a purpose?
I couldn’t think of any way the Treo could be used for tracking — certainly no more than any other cell phone — but maybe I’m being naive. For example, if the company is running the Treos’ e-mail through their servers, they could be monitoring that…but is there anything more Treo-specific that might be going on here? Does anyone else have insights?
I asked my friend who’s in the know about this sort of thing, and here’s what he said:
“Sure, but it depends on what the tracking is for.
For location, a GSM (Cingular/T-Mobile) Treo would need to be equipped with a GPS receiver, either as an expansion card, or via Bluetooth to a Bluetooth GPS device. Presumably in either of these cases, the user would either a) see the expansion card, or b) know about the external bluetooth device.
Plus, the Treo would need to run some kind of software app that would have the tracking parameters and either transmit them over the air, or store them locally where the boss guy would somehow download the data (again, Bluetooth or by pulling an expansion/memory card or something similar). There are ways to get less precise location (like a cell tower estimate) which can be as accurate as a few hundred meters, all the way up to a few thousand meters.
This would not require a GPS expansion card.
If it was a CDMA Treo running on Sprint or Verizon, then the phone has built-in location technology and won’t require a third party add on, and could be tracked through the cell network. This uses a technology called gpsOne from Qualcomm, and can be done without the user ever knowing.
Of course, other tracking could occur, such as what is mentioned in the posting (reading their email, etc.). Also, just knowing the IP addresses of where the user sends/receives mail from can help to “track” that person.”
I asked my friend who’s in the know about this sort of thing, and here’s what he said:
“Sure, but it depends on what the tracking is for.
For location, a GSM (Cingular/T-Mobile) Treo would need to be equipped with a GPS receiver, either as an expansion card, or via Bluetooth to a Bluetooth GPS device. Presumably in either of these cases, the user would either a) see the expansion card, or b) know about the external bluetooth device.
Plus, the Treo would need to run some kind of software app that would have the tracking parameters and either transmit them over the air, or store them locally where the boss guy would somehow download the data (again, Bluetooth or by pulling an expansion/memory card or something similar). There are ways to get less precise location (like a cell tower estimate) which can be as accurate as a few hundred meters, all the way up to a few thousand meters.
This would not require a GPS expansion card.
If it was a CDMA Treo running on Sprint or Verizon, then the phone has built-in location technology and won’t require a third party add on, and could be tracked through the cell network. This uses a technology called gpsOne from Qualcomm, and can be done without the user ever knowing.
Of course, other tracking could occur, such as what is mentioned in the posting (reading their email, etc.). Also, just knowing the IP addresses of where the user sends/receives mail from can help to “track” that person.”
Another scary theory which I shall proceed to introduce and then criticize is the idea that the camera could somehow be recording photos of the insides of your purses and pockets.
This isn’t really feasible because of the overhead involved in any kind of ongoing Palm process. Even if it simply limited photos to snapshots, you’d notice that it took about a billion years to respond to any kind of input for one, to say nothing of the data transfer speed.
“PalmOS, kind of crappy for YOUR protection!”
And to kill off any lingering fears of spyware, just flash your Palms with newer ROMs: http://www.palm.com/us/support/downloads/treo650updater/
Another scary theory which I shall proceed to introduce and then criticize is the idea that the camera could somehow be recording photos of the insides of your purses and pockets.
This isn’t really feasible because of the overhead involved in any kind of ongoing Palm process. Even if it simply limited photos to snapshots, you’d notice that it took about a billion years to respond to any kind of input for one, to say nothing of the data transfer speed.
“PalmOS, kind of crappy for YOUR protection!”
And to kill off any lingering fears of spyware, just flash your Palms with newer ROMs: http://www.palm.com/us/support/downloads/treo650updater/
> Another scary theory which I shall proceed to introduce and then criticize is the idea that the camera could
> somehow be recording photos of the insides of your purses and pockets.
Just becuase it’s digital doesn’t mean the fundamentals have been changed.
You still need light to take pictures.
> Another scary theory which I shall proceed to introduce and then criticize is the idea that the camera could
> somehow be recording photos of the insides of your purses and pockets.
Just becuase it’s digital doesn’t mean the fundamentals have been changed.
You still need light to take pictures.