[dendory]

If true, it's surprising that it took so long for someone to find this. Isn't it trivial to check on what your phone is sending off if you use wifi with a network scanner?

With that said I bet this is all for their social networking integration, some engineer thinking it would be cool for them to aggregate all your social data in the cloud, with no concept of the privacy implications.

[lawnchair_larry]

Apparently others have reported concerns as early as 2011:

https://forums.motorola.com/posts/64e9971ab3

Amazing that they've been doing it for so long.

[oceanstone]

The phone from the OP article was released in June of 2011.

[noselasd]

One of the first things I did. I found HTC Desire always goes and grab http://xtra3.gpsonextra.net/xtra.bin on boot up. Couldn't find anything else "suspicious" though.