HTC Hub, The Phantom Data Leaker Identified?

Mike Halsey MVP
Jan 21, 2011
Updated • Dec 1, 2012
Microsoft
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6

I've been conducting my own investigation and tests into the "rogue app" which is leaking data on Windows Phones.  I want to stress at this point that my evidence was not collected in a scientific way and I've been wrong before.  While I'm pointing the finger in a particular direction I still could be wrong, it could have been a blip.  I think though you'll agree with me that they evidence is quite strong.

In investigating the phantom data leak I had a good look around the forums and, while there were a great many theories about which app was responsible, more people seemed to be pointing the finger at the HTC Hub Live Tile than anything else.  As I've got an HTC Mozart I decided to put this to the test.

Now I don't use the HTC Hub, preferring instead to use the excellent Weatherbug to deliver my weather information.  This too has a live tile and uses almost no data at all.  In fact my data usage for my Windows Phone sits at around 150Mb a month, and that's with the phone checking my email at least every 15 minutes and with some light web browsing too.

I will always wake up in the morning to see that my data usage hasn't increased at all because of this.  This is one of the advantages of having an HTC Mozart on the Orange network in the UK, they have an app which allows me to check my call and data usage in real time, any time.  It was this app I called upon in my investigation.

Before going to bed last night I switched in the HTC Hub Live Tile and set it to automatically download weather data every 3 hours.  The only other thing running here to poll the Internet was my email which, as I've said, uses almost no data.

At the time of going to bed my data usage was showing at 6Mb for the month, which is nothing really.  Upon waking this morning however I discovered that data usage had shot up to 18Mb, an extra usage of a whole 12Mb during the night.

Now I stress again that this is an unscientific test but in the absence of Microsoft or any other company coming clean and putting their hands up to accept responsibility, people around the world will still be leaking data from their phones and, perhaps, running up hefty data bills in the process.

All I can say is that we want to hear from you.  Try removing the HTC Hub Live Tile from your Windows Phone if you are experiencing phantom data loss and report back to us here whether it did or did not solve the problem for you.

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Comments

  1. Some Dude said on March 19, 2023 at 11:42 am
    Reply

    Are these articles AI generated?

    Now the duplicates are more obvious.

    1. boris said on March 19, 2023 at 11:48 pm
      Reply

      This is below AI generated crap. It is copy of Microsoft Help website article without any relevant supporting text. Anyway you can find this information on many pages.

  2. Paul(us) said on March 20, 2023 at 1:32 am
    Reply

    Yes, but why post the exact same article under a different title twice on the same day (19 march 2023), by two different writers?
    1.) Excel Keyboard Shortcuts by Trevor Monteiro.
    2.) 70+ Excel Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows by Priyanka Monteiro

    Why oh why?

    1. Clairvaux said on September 6, 2023 at 11:30 am
      Reply

      Yeah. Tell me more about “Priyanka Monteiro”. I’m dying to know. Indian-Portuguese bot ?

  3. John G. said on August 18, 2023 at 4:36 pm
    Reply

    Probably they will announce that the taskbar will be placed at top, right or left, at your will.

    Special event by they is a special crap for us.

  4. yanta said on August 18, 2023 at 11:59 pm
    Reply

    If it’s Microsoft, don’t buy it.
    Better brands at better prices elsewhere.

  5. John G. said on August 20, 2023 at 4:22 am
    Reply

    All new articles have zero count comments. :S

  6. Anonymous said on September 5, 2023 at 7:48 am
    Reply

    WTF? So, If I add one photo to 5 albums, will it count 5x on my storage?
    It does not make any sense… on google photos, we can add photo to multiple albums, and it does not generate any additional space usage

    I have O365 until end of this year, mostly for onedrive and probably will jump into google one

  7. St Albans Digital Printing Inc said on September 5, 2023 at 11:53 am
    Reply

    Photo storage must be kept free because customers chose gadgets just for photos and photos only.

  8. Anonymous said on September 5, 2023 at 12:47 pm
    Reply

    What a nonsense. Does it mean that albums are de facto folders with copies of our pictures?

    1. GG said on September 6, 2023 at 8:24 am
      Reply

      Sounds exactly like the poor coding Microsoft is known for in non-critical areas i.e. non Windows Core/Office Core.

      I imagine a manager gave an employee the task to create the album feature with hardly any time so they just copied the folder feature with some cosmetic changes.

      And now that they discovered what poor management results in do they go back and do the album feature properly?

      Nope, just charge the customer twice.

      Sounds like a go-getter that needs to be promoted for increasing sales and managing underlings “efficiently”, said the next layer of middle management.

  9. d3x said on September 5, 2023 at 7:33 pm
    Reply

    When will those comments get fixed? Was every editor here replaced by AI and no one even works on this site?

  10. Scroogled said on September 5, 2023 at 10:47 pm
    Reply

    Instead of a software company, Microsoft is now a fraud company.

  11. ard said on September 7, 2023 at 4:59 pm
    Reply

    For me this is proof that Microsoft has a back-door option into all accounts in their cloud.
    quote “…… as the MSA key allowed the hacker group access to virtually any cloud account at Microsoft…..”
    unquote

    so this MSA key which is available to MS officers can give access to all accounts in MS cloud.This is the backdoor that MS has into the cloud accounts. Lucky I never got any relevant files of mine in their (MS) cloud.

  12. Andy Prough said on September 7, 2023 at 6:52 pm
    Reply

    >”Now You: what is your theory?”

    That someone handed an employee a briefcase full of cash and the employee allowed them access to all their accounts and systems.

    Anything that requires 5-10 different coincidences to happen is highly unlikely. Occam’s razor.

  13. TelV said on September 8, 2023 at 12:04 pm
    Reply

    Good reason to never login to your precious machine with a Microsoft a/c a.k.a. as the cloud.

  14. Anonymous said on September 18, 2023 at 1:23 pm
    Reply

    The GAFAM are always very careless about our software automatically sending to them telemetry and crash dumps in our backs. It’s a reminder not to send them anything when it’s possible to opt out, and not to opt in, considering what they may contain. And there is irony in this carelessness biting them back, even if in that case they show that they are much more cautious when it’s their own data that is at stake.

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