Summary: Geeks show that Microsoft's products do not behave as Microsoft is claiming when subjected to class action lawsuits

"M

icrosoft's Vision of Phones is Orwellian" is what we argued (with proof) earlier this month. This is not news because we wrote about this before, but the proof is becoming ever more detailed with posts like this one, contradicting Microsoft by stating that "Windows Phone DOES transmit location information without user consent". To quote: "Statements made by Microsoft to the US House of Representatives prove to be at odds with how its Windows Phone OS actually works. [...] 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. [...] 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

But it gets worse...."

The source of the claims is actually pro-Microsoft, which doesn't help Microsoft at all. ⬆