Motorola Mobility Smartphone Security issue: "Motorola is listening"

I recently learned of an interesting article:  "Motorola is listening".  Certainly in this times of heightened attitudes about data privacy, I think its important that people be aware of these things.

In a nutshell, the author discovered that his Motorola smartphone (a Droid X2) was sending a LOT of information to Motorola, despite not having Motoblur.

Now, a word about Motoblur.  Motorola Mobility rolled out this program as an enhanced UI for their earlier Android phones.  You initially couldn't use your phone without signing up with the Motoblur service.  You were encouraged to enter all your username and passwords for the various services you used (email accounts, twitter, facebook, etc), and it would give you alerts.  What I think most people didn't know was that this information was actually stored on Motorola's servers.  It's was kind of a cloud service without you realizing it.  I think this was done probably as you moved from phone to phone, you could just log back into your Motoblur account on your new phone and have all your settings there. 

But people hated Motoblur, and later versions were less intrusive.  AFAIK, in their most recent phones (the newest RAZR line), Motoblur is gone.  But they still use Motoblur for some things.  (When I was "dogfooding" new versions of Android on a RAZR M, the updates were sent to my phone via Motoblur).  I had to deal with Motoblur on my original Atrix 4G.  But I don't recall dealing with it on my Droid Bionic, and certainly didn't have it on my RAZR M.

The author's phone, AFAIK, doesn't have Motoblur, BUT it is interesting (and a bit scary) that Motorola Mobility still seems to be gathering information from his phone.  He has asked people with different models of Motorola phones to test them (he provides the tool he used) and report back on their results.  I recommend people take a look at this article for updates.  He has already put up several based on feedback.  Will be interesting to see where this goes.

And what about other companies?  Are Apple, Samsung, HTC, etc doing something similar?

3LM- what could have been

This posting may be a little different from what you might expect on a security blog.  One subject I've loved is history.  This means that often times I am interested in the history or development of technology or ideas in other areas I am involved in.  So this posting will take a look at the history and what could have been with one company.

3LM, 3 Laws Mobility, is (or I guess now was) a small firm involved in the overall Android MDM marketplace.  The name, an alusion to Asimov's "Three Laws of Robots", stood for the guiding principles of the company:

Protect your user. A mobile device may not harm its user or, through inaction, allow its user to come to harm though malicious code or content.

Protect yourself. A mobile device must protect itself and the integrity of its data and secured communications.

Obey. A mobile device must let the user use the device freely, as long as such usage does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

The company's product was not something that was sold to the end users or to enterprises.  It made changes to the Android OS, and so would be something the device manufactorers would encorporate into their builds of Android on their devices.  This would extend and enhance Android, making it easier to be managed by other products.

Frankly, stuff that probably should have been in Android in the first place.