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juiceme	2013-11-06 , 15:27
Community Council \| Posts: 4,920 \| Thanked: 12,867 times \| Joined on May 2012 @ Southerrn Finland	#5

Originally Posted by ggabriel

Why does an application need my IMEI? Since when do you tell the SN of your computer to MS Windows for it to be installed? (or Linux or whatever you use for that matter)

Are you sure

On quite a few computers, at least on laptops, the BIOS exports the device serial number to the OS. How do you know what Windows does with that...?

Originally Posted by ggabriel

This isn't about any urban legend to me, it's about common sense.

But what are you afraid of? That Men-In-Black track you down with it? And somehow use it against you?
For privacy, I'd begin by not using any Social Media before restorting to esoteric things like protecting your IMEI...

Originally Posted by ggabriel

Register where? If an application is going to open a connection to the internet to transmit my IMEI, I'd like to know it first to avoid it. If the application is going to register itself somewhere on the device, then why the IMEI?

In this case propably they just want to know that there actually is someone downloading the SW for a specific device make/model. (as that is one thing you can tell from an IMEI number)
Propably they just collect some harmless statistics.

In some other cases, where it is SW that you buy a license to use, it is bound to your IMEI so that you cannot copy the SW to some other device... kind of simple anti-piracy procedure.

Originally Posted by ggabriel

I have never had this experience with any mobile application that I have ever used.

Then you certainly have not installed much SW on symbian devices as it used to be quite usual procedure there.

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