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Carrier IQ's Mobile Tool Raises Privacy Questions
- by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, December 1, 2011
What is Carrier IQ, and why are Web watchers so excited about it? Hitting at the heart of user privacy concerns, it’s a mobile diagnostic tool that reportedly spies on users’ keystrokes, and has now been found on Android, BlackBerry and Nokia phones, as well all versions of Apple’s iOS.
“Carrier IQ, as (software developer Trevor) Eckhart Eckhart demonstrates … secretly records the numbers a user calls, their text messages, the content of Web searches (including encrypted ones) and a whole mess of other data,” The Next Web reports.
After a similar summation, Mashable writes: “This is the short version of what is quickly becoming a very complicated story with huge implications for user privacy.”
“That’s not just creepy, says Paul Ohm, a former Justice Department prosecutor and law professor at the University of Colorado Law School,” writes Forbes. “He thinks it’s also likely grounds for a class action lawsuit based on a federal wiretapping law.”
As Carrier IQ recently told Wired.com, however, its wares are for “gathering information off the handset to understand the mobile-user experience, where phone calls are dropped, where signal quality is poor, why applications crash and battery life.”
“While we look at many aspects of a device’s performance, we are counting and summarizing performance, not recording keystrokes or providing tracking tools,” the company said in the statement posted by ABCNews.com. “The metrics and tools we derive are not designed to deliver such information, nor do we have any intention of developing such tools.”
Legitimate or not, ZDNet suggests that phone carriers are also implicated in the CarrierIQ story. “The coverage of the CarrierIQ debacle is centered around the app that is recording the information, as if that is the culprit,” it writes. “Fact is this is just the vehicle to deliver a service that the CarrierIQ company sells to carriers.”
Claims ZDNet: “Carriers pay CarrierIQ to record all of this information to help them troubleshoot network problems that might be caused by individual handset model. It is a legitimate service carried far too deeply.”
As mocoNews reports, carriers are scrambling to clear their names, and distance themselves from Carrier IQ. The names of those carriers that actually use the software are certain to emerge shortly.
Gavin O'Malley edits MediaPost's Mobile Marketing Daily and MoBlog column. Follow him: @mp_gavin. You can reach Gavin at gavin@mediapost.com.
This sounds like a case for crisis management for the phone companies. It also makes me wonder about the banks that are encouraging people to "bank by phone". These stories give solid reasons for consumers to be offended at banks asking them to enter personal financial information into their phones.
It's time for the media to ask why this "tool" has not been outlawed. Ya, right. The phone companies are that concerned about dropped calls.
Question: Is CarrierIQ data transamission being subsidized by subscribers?????
The longer this is not stopped in its own tracks, the more subscribers will not only be paying for mistakes in their own account, but for others too. Casandra speaks.