Want a little support for your Palm handheld? One reader recently discovered that PalmOne was happy to provide him very, very, very little support indeed, and at the mere cost of his privacy.
"My laptop crashed, and I discovered that I'd lost my original PalmOne installation CD," the reader wrote. Unable to find the Outlook conduits on the PalmOne website, he used their e-mail support form to ask where he could find the conduits for download. "The reply came back that the Outlook conduits could not be downloaded from the website. However, they would graciously allow me to contact the PalmOne telephone technical support to purchase another CD."
Not only was that not the biggest help, the reader noticed something that irritated him even more. "To add insult to injury, to get this e-mail 'support' I had to agree to accept spam coming from them," the reader wrote. "At the bottom of the web form that one uses to send them e-mail, it says:
By clicking 'submit' you agree to be contacted by palmOne, Inc. for support as well as marketing purposes and acknowledge your rights as part of our Privacy Policy."
That Palm privacy policy, in fact, is pretty much a you've-got-no-privacy-so-get-over-it statement. It declares that PalmOne "may choose to trade, sell or rent your personal information with trustworthy third parties" as it chooses unless you go try to use an opt-out page that wants even more information about you than the name, e-mail address, and phone number the support form asks for.
The reader ultimately discovered that, contrary to what Palm support told him, he could download the conduits and files he needed. "A little Googling revealed that the Outlook conduits themselves are part of the downloadable Palm Desktop software, but that they can't be used without a small file on the install CD called OutlookSwitcher.exe," he wrote. "I found that file online, downloaded it, and my problem was solved. PalmOne, however, lost a loyal customer -- one who has purchased dozens of Palms for postgraduate students at a large university. Are these guys trying to lose their long-term customers to Microsoft?"
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9:59:03 AM 
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