Palm suffered a fair amount of negative publicity last week when a Palm Pre user revealed that he had discovered that his Palm Pre handset had been sending back inofrmation regarding the ways in which he used to the phone, up to once a day.

Palm Pre user Joey Hess discovered that his phone was reporting his location over a secure connection back to Palm, as well as information about applications on the phone, including thrid party apps that may have not been available in the Palm app store.

Hess told The Register: “As a software engineer, I can understand why Palm’s engineers would be interested in the crash data, but the data gathered during a crash includes potentially private information, such as a list of all the programs running on the phone. Also, it is much more respectful of the user to ask before sending such crash data.”

Palm have now responded to the accusation that the company have breached the privacy rights of its users by gathering user information via the Pre handset.

Palm said in a press release:

“Palm takes privacy very seriously, and offers users ways to turn data collecting services on and off. Our privacy policy is like many policies in the industry and includes very detailed language about potential scenarios in which we might use a customer’s information, all toward a goal of offering a great user experience. For instance, when location based services are used, we collect their information to give them relevant local results in Google Maps. We appreciate the trust that users give us with their information, and have no intention to violate that trust.”

[Via: The Register]