Ever had a friend who just wouldn’t leave you alone?  Who just wanted to know everything about you and logged it in his or her journal for safekeeping?  Yeah, you thought it was a bit creepy and it even drained you a bit, but hey it’s all fun and games until he or she’s watching you sleep, right?  Well if you’re on Sprint or AT&T, your phone probably has a little buddy able to follow you around and track everything you do, and I mean EVERYTHING.  Carrier IQ, or CIQ, as it is often referred is a “troubleshooting” software installed deep into the Ram of your phone.  Don’t get me wrong, I love troubleshooting.  I do it for my job, but I draw the line when a program wants to find out where I was and what I was doing at the moment something went wrong.  Oh, and that draining feeling I mentioned…that’syour battery.

Originally discovered on Eclair and removed by kOnane for ACS’s SyndicateRom Frozen, CIQ sparked a privacy debate over how much access should your phone company have to you.  The desire to purge all CarrierIQ gained traction when it was discovered and removed by TrevE in popular HTC phones, as well.  As we are all familiar with metrics, since our jobs love to use them to reduce our raises (just kidding guys,) anything Carrier IQ wants to make into a metric becomes a metric.  As egzthunder explained,  if a carrier wanted to find out why all the calls in a specific area dropped around 5 pm,  they could tap into the system for relevant information.  They can also tap in for much, much more.  

At that same moment they can find out where you were when that call dropped, what your phone was doing, what apps were open, what key presses you had made in the recent time period.  This all seems very benign, as long as they are using it to relevantly to solve legitimate problems. As Facebook has taught us though, responsible corporate use of personal info is a pipe dream.  What we are looking at is the potential for everyday data harvesting.  Every friends’ personal data, every entry of your credit card into Amazon, every text you send your mom can be harvested as a “metric” and potentially sold to the highest bidder.  After applying the NOCIQ patch, one user even reported that CIQ texts began arriving on his phone as the service desperately looked to relink and harvestmore data.

The worst part is, there’s no way to opt out of it, except on Verizon.  This puts customers into a difficult situation.  To protect our privacy, should we have to risk voiding the warranty on our phones if we don’t want to?  The only opt out offered to those on Sprint and AT&T are the flashable mods available to strip the phone clean of the parasite.  To do so requires a custom recovery and root access.  These days a phone has become as personal as a wallet and with NFC chips this has made the metaphor come true.  As the technology takes off, you better believe they’ll want to track your purchases, what card you used and how it affected your credit score.  They may even sell the info to your companies providing you with loans or insurance policies to give an upper hand to those quotingyou rates.

Finally, this can have political implications in a very McCarthyist sort of way.  Do you like to track your candidate on the phone?  Want to participate in an Occupy movement?  Want to do something radical politically in your 20′s just so you can say you fought for something when you’re old and bored?  Well now even that is information that is up for grabs.  Privacy comes at a premium these days and everyone wants their way into your business.  I wouldn’t let my parents track me as a kid growing up and that’s a normal reaction, I sure as heck won’t stand for my phone company wanting to know what I’m doing and the ability to record it, even if all I’m doing is trollingTwitter.

This sort of invasive, veiled practice needs to stop.  Carrier support for services and devices is a great thing and helps us all, but there are far less invasive ways of doing so.  Ethics within companies are at an all-time low and my belief that carriers are including the software for our benefit alone is strained to say the least.  There needs to be a written opt-out clause in contracts and a version of stock software people are allowed to agree to where Carrier IQ, or any software like it, is not included.

 

by Jon Root

 

Original SRF 1.1.0 thread http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=976194&highlight=frozen

 

Why I removed CarrierIQ http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1283198&highlight=why+i+removed

 

Logging Reveal http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1247108

 

Scumbag Hat image http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRlelAioPzXt_ct3aLiMusrrVYM8q9HW9od0_0qcc6YSDPDDayIxsD6ZQ

 

Carrier IQ logo http://gpsobsessed.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/logo_carrieriq.gif

 

 

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ACSyndicate, Breaking News, Carriers