The Carrier IQ Controversy Continues

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Thanks to damning statements made by the FBI over the weekend, the Carrier IQ fiasco is raging on with the company once again dancing around the subject. The company vehemently denies handing any data over to the FBI but, in reality, isn't that just semantics? The data they collect is simply handed over via your wireless carrier. :rolleyes:

In an email to VentureBeat, a company spokesperson wrote, “Just to clarify all of the media frenzy around the FBI, Carrier IQ has never provided any data to the FBI.” Carrier IQ is a company that monitors mobile data on more than 100 million phones around the world. It sends reports related to app performance, signal strength and battery life back to carriers and manufacturers.
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Saying "we dont hand over any data to law enforcement" when they hand the data over to your wireless provder...which is then promptly turned over to the authorities is retarded.

If it wasn't collected in the first place, it couldn't be handed over.
 
I don't see a problem with the software. I don't blame carrier iq for writing software, I blame the carriers for being douche bags. Like we're surprised. We expect this behavior so when its discovered it just proves people right that they're scum.
 
Zangmonkey said:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/carrier-iq-architecture

The EFF explains where some of the paranoia lies.
In effect: carriers *might* be getting this data and they *might* do whatever they want with it.
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That's why a lot of people are panicking, because that *might* be very bad.

The logic is simple. Why have an application to log so much stuff if you intend to never collect it and use it for illicit purposes? Anything they need to know about you that's related to your relationship with the carrier, can be done through their end with their network.

They already know how long you talk for, text, and use data. What more could they possibly need to know?
 
Ashbringer said:
They already know how long you talk for, text, and use data. What more could they possibly need to know?
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I would imagine carriers want to know what the data is being used for, for starters. Is Netflix pulling down our network capacity in rural Kansas? Why are so many people polling this particular tower in center city Philadelphia on Saturday at 1 PM? Do we need to expand coverage or density to make up for it? (By the way, this is a larger scale idea of something I do at work with campus-wide WiFi.) There's no metric that a carrier can do through their equipment to judge any of this (just as I can't tell whether an issue on my network is caused by a PC, an iPad, or a XBox from my desk), and 'random survey' results aren't conclusive when you want to observe nation-wide or global usage.

To address the overall "scandal" I must say this: If you know how a cell phone works, then you probably aren't too concerned about what Carrier IQ is doing. If you want to keep your privacy from being "violated" by a mobile phone, your only option is to not own a mobile phone.
 
yojimbo said:
I would imagine carriers want to know what the data is being used for, for starters. Is Netflix pulling down our network capacity in rural Kansas?
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Again, illicit purposes. It's not their business to know how I use my data. This can and will be used to throttle said services.

Why are so many people polling this particular tower in center city Philadelphia on Saturday at 1 PM? Do we need to expand coverage or density to make up for it? (By the way, this is a larger scale idea of something I do at work with campus-wide WiFi.)
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They know what tower you connect to without the help of carrier IQ. Says so on the damn bill. How you think they know if you're roaming?

To address the overall "scandal" I must say this: If you know how a cell phone works, then you probably aren't too concerned about what Carrier IQ is doing. If you want to keep your privacy from being "violated" by a mobile phone, your only option is to not own a mobile phone.
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The better answer is to install a custom rom onto your phone. 100% carrier IQ free. Can't wait for cyanogenmod 9.

This video shows how the application works. It's enough to know it logs key strokes. I do use my phone to log onto online services and those do include banks. If that information is being sent to anyone then I don't know, but it is logging the information. It's doing it as plain text. Enough to cause problems.

At a glance, it could be my carriers are collecting unnecessary info. Going deeper, others can. It's a huge security hole, and nobody asked for my permission to do this. You can shovel this shit all you want, but it stinks either way.
 
Ashbringer said:
The better answer is to install a custom rom onto your phone. 100% carrier IQ free. Can't wait for cyanogenmod 9.
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Root + ROM are the droids you're looking for. Ever since I installed custom ROM on my Thunderbolt the battery lives forever and it's more responsive. I can record videos, while having gigs of movies on my SD card and not have a "slideshow" until the video is processed. Anyone that doesn't root + rom is missing out on their phone's true capabilities.
 
TheWeazmeister said:
Root + ROM are the droids you're looking for. Ever since I installed custom ROM on my Thunderbolt the battery lives forever and it's more responsive. I can record videos, while having gigs of movies on my SD card and not have a "slideshow" until the video is processed. Anyone that doesn't root + rom is missing out on their phone's true capabilities.
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Should not have to do any of this shit to get a good working phone especially considering how much they cost and how much we pay to put service to them.
 
HisSvt76 said:
Should not have to do any of this shit to get a good working phone especially considering how much they cost and how much we pay to put service to them.
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This is true. At the moment the carriers aren't doing a damn thing about it. Only Verizon has not put this software onto their phones.

So either switch to Verizon or do something about it. It's worth to note that iPhones have it disabled by default, and is something you could turn on if you wanted to. Wp7 phones also don't have it. So this mostly effects Android phones. Mostly newer phones.
 
Went into t-mobile yesterday. The guy pretended to not know what carrier IQ is and kept trying to change the subject.
 
Do you really think this is all going to stop?

This incident isn't going to stop crap like this from happening. They're going to throw the dev 'under the bus' and just burry similar software deeper on future releases.

One nation, one world under surveillance.
 
I ran that ID app on my HTC Sensation, says Carrier IQ is not installed. Maybe tmo isn't using it?
 
im still trying to weigh in though in though the usefulness of Carrier IQ, well like all things if its usage is abused that is where the problem is (I used to work for a cellular company way way back, just found the software actually interesting)
 
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