14 DAY TRIAL // A new report claims that Microsoft received user data collected by Nokia from Lumia phones without buyers’ consent, with all information stored on servers overseas.
According to a report by The Helsinki Times, it all started a couple of years ago when Nokia launched the first Lumia phone, with specific user information collected by the Finnish mobile phone maker and automatically transferred to Microsoft without any prior warning.
“Nokia’s top management has known since spring 2011 that Lumia’s operating system transmits a great deal of information about the phone’s user to Microsoft. The company, however, has kept quiet about it, because the matter is embarrassing,” the paper writes adding that Microsoft, which has already been involved in the PRISM scandal, might have submitted the collected information to US intelligence agencies.
Nokia, on the other hand, denied the accusations and said that no user information was collected and submitted to Microsoft.
“Nokia is not aware that those kinds of functionalities or components, which enable the revealing of the user’s private information to outsiders without the knowledge of the user, would have intentionally been installed into its products sold in Finland,” said a response from Ilkka Rahnasto, Nokia’s VP of Legal and Intellectual Property, said.
Interestingly, The Helsinki Times performed its own test to determine whether information is indeed collected from Lumia phones, claiming that mobile phones connect to a server located abroad and transfer the data to Microsoft in the United States.
“Only after that can the phone get connected to a Finnish web address. In other words, Microsoft can, when it wants to, monitor what pages the Finnish user visited,” the newspaper adds.