Just unpacked my Sony Z3 compact, haven't installed a single app and its connecting to China... Needless to say, I will never use this phone or any other Sony product ever again.
Without taking a position on this particular case, I must observe that if you are going to boycott every company that has done something that allows some government to spy on customers, your list of vendors will be down to... I was going to say your local grocery shop, but thinking about it, they probably have a credit card reader, and I'd be astonished if there weren't at least some cases of governments tracking people via credit card purchases.
If they send data from my phone (potentially private information) to a foreign country without telling me, then I think its reasonable to boycott them. If I knew that my local grocery store sent my private information to china I would boycott them too. But I'm fairly convinced that they don't do that.
Eh, it's a push service. They aren't mining your information. It's used for their myXperia service, which is used to locate your device with a sound alert or display its position on a map. You can also erase data and/or lock your device if you lose it.[1]
Google, MS, Apple, Facebook and Twitter operate out a foreign county for most of us. At most they "tell" by way of click through agreements wherein you sign away your firstborn and then some, otherweise you are without smartphones and social media.
I'm willing to give SCEI (the Playstation unit) the benefit of the doubt still (despite their hacking scandal), but I'm surely done with Sony Mobile devices for sure.
I was just glad that DRM got the name-and-shame it deserved every time Sony revoked a feature via online software-downgrade. Now I hate my PS3 and only use it for Amazon and YouTube. The games I paid full price for all have their hand out for DLC. Bleah.
The connections to IP addresses have been seen on other phones so it's probably some software people have installed http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2509815