Windows Phone DOES transmit location information without user consent | ZDNet

Windows Phone DOES transmit location information without user consent | ZDNet:

Summary: Statements made by Microsoft to the US House of Representatives prove to be at odds with how its Windows Phone OS actually works.

Earlier this month Microsoft was hit with a lawsuit which claimed that the new Windows Phone OS tracked users without their consent. Now new evidence has come to light which seems to prove that there is some substance to this lawsuit.

Enter Rafael Rivera, one of the programmer behind the Windows Phone jailbreaking tool ChevronWP. After initially being skeptical about the lawsuit, Rivera decided to test the Windows Phone camera app to see what information, if any, it sent to Microsoft when the phone was reset to the ‘out-of-box’ experience.

Note: The OS version tested by Rivera was Windows Phone OS 7.0.7004.0.

What Rivera discovered was that the app sent several packets to Microsoft, one to agps.location.live.net and several to Microsoft’s Location Inference (codenamed Orion) service hosted at inference.location.live.net. The information transmitted included:

• OS Version
• Device Information
• Wireless access points in the vicinity of the handset, including MAC addresses and power levels
• Various GUID-based identifiers
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