Carrier IQ is an app deeply - very deeply - embedded in many - very many - smartphones. It's so deeply embedded, it doesn't even show up in any lists of running applications on your device. But running it is. And it's constantly sending information back to your mobile carrier.
Ever since it was unearthed, manufacturers and carriers have been fast to claim that no personal data is collected. Only crash reports and operating stuff like that. And only to improve the service you get.
Well, now the company that makes Carrier IQ has sprung to life and tried to counter claims made in a YouTube video which appears to show key presses and SMS messages being logged by the app.
“What the video is depicting is the application printing out what are known as bugging logs. It’s a way that applications keep a temporary record of the things they were doing so if anything were to break, a developer could go and read that record and figure out what went wrong. That’s very different from the application actually recording that information and sending it off to the carrier” Andrew Coward, VP of marketing, Carrier IQIt appears what he's saying is the app might collect personal data, but it discards it before sending the info to carrier.
“The content of SMS messages are never logged. There are two things that happen when SMS messages are received. One is, obviously, we count them, the ones that succeed, the ones that fail. We do also record the telephone numbers the SMSs are from and to. So for example, if you send and SMS to me and it fails, you want to be able to work out did it not leave your phone, was it a communication problem with the tower, did it somehow not get to me in the last mile. This is a two-way conversation. You need the know both ends of the chain to understand. The content of the SMS is never stored and never transmitted” Andrew Coward, Carrier IQAm I missing a point here? It's not so much what info the app harvests and sends back, it's what it's capable of collecting and using.
Apple says Carrier IQ is only pre-installed on the iPhone 4 running iOS5. You can't uninstall it, but - apparently - you can disable it in Settings > General > About > Diagnostics & Usage > select Don't Send.
A few apps have been developed for Android devices to detect Carrier IQ. Probably the best one is Carrier IQ Detector by Lookout Labs. It will let you know if it's installed, but it can't disable it.
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