Comments on: Carrier IQ: Blame operators, not us

By: APai

APai — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 04:24:00 +0000

hmm, this is ODD!

apple and other companies, US carriers foist a malicious software developed by a US company on US customers, and samsung and HTC get lawsuits against them ?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 18:18:00 +0000

Duh, businesses have more money :P

By: bluecourse

bluecourse — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:27:00 +0000

This is excerpted directly from Carrier IQ’s promotional material:

“IQ Insight Experience Manager uses data directly from the mobile phone itself to give a precise view of how users interact with both their phones and the services delivered through them, even if the phone is not communicating with the network. … Identify exactly how your customers interact with services and which ones they use. See which content they consume, even offline.”

At no time did I as a user, who has read each section of the Contract for Service and Privacy Policy agree to this.
It is my understanding that this is potentially installed at the kernel level, meaning that simply rooting the phone may not remove it. This means there are 140,000,000+ handsets that shoudl have to be replaced or bought back by the carriers.

Additionally we are all paying for that data transmission back to the carriers, as they measure and limit our data. What if we withhold payment until this is resolved. I can assure you their actuaries will freak.

By: Matt Kimball

Matt Kimball — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:23:00 +0000

we = mortified denizens of the internet
what can we prove = systemic violation of privacy by organizations that have no right to do so and have deprived us of our right to not participate.
where we get our information = the internet, first hand experience, common sense
can we prove that you are not right? well you havent said anything yet. Nothing. But I’ll bite. You’re wrong. The nothing you’ve said is wrong.
CIQ’s own training manuals make it clear that they send observation data back to their data center once a day, so i guess the rest of that day they observe… so theres 24 hour observation, not to mention the many, many other ways we are constantly being scrutinized.

Also, Al Qaeda == CIA, its all a part of a new cold war, gotta keep spinning those military wheels even if theres no one left to fight.

I dont think i’ll be replying to anything else you have to say Vladimir. Good day.

By: Styler1972

Styler1972 — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 15:53:00 +0000

Why wouldn’t you turn off debugging mode for a production version of the application? It’s best practice not to waste time/space with debug logs if the developer is never going to see that phone. Unless you plan on taking that device into the HQ to troubleshoot the device yourself, I see no need for these logs at all. My career is in application development, and I can tell you that it’s best practice to turn off debugging mode in your live builds.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 10:45:00 +0000

I do plenty of software development and lots and lots of logging. The work I do is highly sensitive some of which can be classified. We follow the business rules of operation on what we should and should not be logging. That type of stuff is subject to constant scrutiny and auditing. You as a developer don’t just decide “oh I’m going to log everything and that should be the norm because we have a job to do as a software developer”. You’re liable even if you are a lowly programmer. Your project manager is liable. Your product manager is liable. There are rules to follow. You can’t be a cowboy programmer and decide where to stick all your sensitive data for your own whim. Thats why some professionals end up in jail. You can’t hide behind ignorance as an excuse when they come with the cuffs.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 10:45:00 +0000

By: Hurley3kgt

Hurley3kgt — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 07:46:00 +0000

This is awful, but if we’re going to fight this we should also fight the patriot act and the NSA which of whom do this everyday as well. Third Echelon anyone?

By: Vladimir R

Vladimir R — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 06:33:00 +0000

Who are “we”? and what you can prove? and where do you get your “information” from? From Trevor? I say that he is wrong in his conclusions. Can you prove that I am not right? No, you can’t. You know why? Because you have nothing, actually. Think about it. All you have is your emotions and blind belief that you are under 24 hours surveillance. Nobody interested in your text messages (unless you are Al Qaeda operative, of course :) )

By: Greg4422

Greg4422 — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 05:19:00 +0000

I don’t care, I do not want carrier IQ on my phone PERIOD!!! And will boycott HTC Samsung and any carrier thats illegally using wiretapping against federal law

By: PeterzOpinion

PeterzOpinion — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 04:16:00 +0000

Here! Hear! The entire argument boils down to Sean Phillips basic point. I don’t give a s— what rationale is used for CIQ. I never asked for it, I don’t want it, and THEY DO NOT HAVE MY PERMISSION!!!

By: Racerjj77

Racerjj77 — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 04:14:00 +0000

They would freak out too if I car jacked them and stole whatever I wanted. After all I’m a 245 pound infantryman, if I can do it then rights don’t matter, I will explain what’s going on after I take whatever I want.

By: Racerjj77

Racerjj77 — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 04:10:00 +0000

Im fine with carrier iq as soon as they pay the data portion of my cell phone bill. No reason I should pay for their business to operate. I personally don’t care how little data they use, one byte is stealing cause they don’t have my permission.

If they can steal from me I should be allowed to kick in the door of carrier iq’s executives and rob everything they own. After all rights don’t matter and stealing from people is ok if you make a profit. Well at least that’s their business model.

By: Racerjj77

Racerjj77 — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 04:05:00 +0000

Since the carriers already have this info then, Carrier IQ needs to be easily deletable with one button by all users. After all it’s useless since the Info is already out there;) “trust us” we hear at carrier IQ have no reason to lie.

We just threatened legal action on the guy who exposed us for fun. We wanted to make him feel special;) again “trust us”. We only take info that cell companies already have. It’s why they pay us for our service too because they want the info twice so they can respond twice as fast;) trust us here at carrier IQ.

We arent easy to shut off like all other apps because, trust us;). You can pay the data usage to send us info about your phone use. It’s good for you, trust us;).

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 03:08:00 +0000

guns don’t kill people, people kill people. carrier IQ doesn’t spy on people, people using carrier IQ’s software spy on people

By: Micah Madru

Micah Madru — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 02:24:00 +0000

You are VERY misinformed. We can prove that they are collecting personal data. They even admitted to it, they say it’s okay because they do it in anonymity though. The fact of the matter though is that they never had us OPT-IN to do this. A lawsuit isn’t premature right now, CarrierIQ is going to be facing massive fines or loses in lawsuits, potentially both.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:57:00 +0000

Well thats not stopping the person/people, who just put out the lawsuit against you(Carrier IQ),HTC and Samsung for this p.o.s.

By: Sean Phillips

Sean Phillips — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:51:00 +0000

I would guess you either did not see the video or you are incapable of understanding what the logs are showing you. To be clear what the logs showed was a carrieriq class logging to the system log everytime the user pressed a keystroke. This proves that the carrieriq software was aware of the keystroke. There is no reason to add extra functionality to the keypress event other than keylogging. Then in their own admission they get an average 200K per day phone home from the application. So I would say it is you, Dime, who does not understand and needs to wake up.

By: UFOHUNTERORGUK

UFOHUNTERORGUK — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:34:00 +0000

You call other people tards but you yourself cannot even use grammar correctly! Its their not there! Now who is the tard?

By: UFOHUNTERORGUK

UFOHUNTERORGUK — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:30:00 +0000

I guess you must work for carrier iq or a mobile company or are you cia? and I quote you ” If these people even remotely pondered for a second the cost of recording everything every person does by uploading it to a dedicated server(huh, why is my phone’s battery dying after 2 hours?), parsing it in a huge data mining datacenter(better put it right next to a hydroelectric dam), and finally spitting out meaningful, searchable data(10 million dollar semi-trailers of computing power and storage dropped off en masse)… it’s mind boggling. And all for what? So they can find out some meaningless person is cheating on their spouse? Now that’s ROI folks! Your average CFO/COO would be all over that. People are so naive, it’s depressing, and the press is just fanning the flames to get more clicks.”………….. You obviously have a very short memory or are mentally challenged! Anybody remember the unexplained high data usage and short battery life of the iphone? its people with attitudes like your that are erroding our civil libertys and freedoms every day…Shame on you..shame on you!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 23:55:00 +0000

Dime Sachman,
Let me understand you… you are upset that people are blowing the CIQ issue out of proportion, but are also upset that people don’t understand that the extent of privacy invasion by other means.Perhaps a better way of elucidating yourself would be to educate the “sheep” without berating then… considering that you are basically upset at the same thing they are, invasion of privacy.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 23:49:00 +0000

According to a leaked internal document at TMobile, business accounts are allowed to opt out of CIQ data collection while consumer accounts are not. Why the difference there? Why aren’t private citizens allowed the same rights as businesses?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 23:06:00 +0000

Don’t hate the playa, hate the game?

By: Abe

Abe — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 22:27:00 +0000

So then, from what Mr. Coward is saying, there isn’t any need for their software, or the information passing through the Carrier IQ servers at all. Thank you Mr. Coward, you just made the point against the need for your software or your company.

By: Dime Sachman

Dime Sachman — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 22:16:00 +0000

Because people are filing lawsuits before the makers even really have a chance to explain to the stupid public how their software works. You would freak out to if California ambulance chasers where filling class-action against your company.

By: Dime Sachman

Dime Sachman — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 22:07:00 +0000

People don’t understand. They say they are not sheep, but they are lapping up this media story like it is going out of style. Not once has that dweeb from youtube produced a textlog of keystrokes or any other concrete evidence that phones are storing and transmitting secretly. They show that same vid of him scrolling through a register. 99.9% of these people see a bunch of computer garble so it must be true. Most of these tards probably have a crap load of spyware on there computer and don’t even realize it, CarrierIQ is the least of your worries people. There are programs that are recording keystrokes and stealing your info, and you come in contact with them everyday. WAKE UP

By: wheel

wheel — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 22:02:00 +0000

oh boo hoo. it’s like the military saying “I was just following orders”. it doesn’t hold water.

By: Matt Kimball

Matt Kimball — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 22:02:00 +0000

yeah you can see it in the image at the top of this article, the lines with ‘iqagent’ in them are the method being called, and the next lines are its output to the debug log, storing the event. Even without verbose debug logging on, those lines would still be in the log file. Its trivial to transport the data from there, doesnt have to be CarrierIQ’s app that does it. But by their own admission, it does transport ‘average per user 200kB/day log data’. Thats a lot of data, a short books worth of text messages and keystrokes, if thats all it was. Also i see no reason to trust their statements they’ve changed so much. Could be much higher log data tallies.

By: Dime Sachman

Dime Sachman — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 21:54:00 +0000

You mean the same thing that your web browser is doing right now and has been doing for the last 15 years? You know shit about technology, and the guy who posted that YT video knows even less. Another wanky news article and people are freaking out. It is about quality control. If they were going to monitor you they would do it at the switch, not by installing a fancy bit of software on your phone.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 21:49:00 +0000

If it was ‘just’ crash data you wouldn’t see the scramble carriers and manufacturers are now doing. Everything being equal, you would see Apple, HTC, and Sprint saying that was nothing to see here. Instead they are running away from this like a hot fire.

By: Guymontagf451

Guymontagf451 — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 21:35:00 +0000

(1)Tens of millions of records can be searched quite easily (milliseconds) with today’s DB software. (2) You don’t need a “huge data mining center” in a semi trailer with hydro power. All you need are a few, beefy servers in a load-balanced config. (3) Once you have the infrastructure put in place, and the SQL queries set up, getting any information you want is only a few clicks or keystrokes away. Have you ever used a business intelligence app? Data mining tens of millions of records is literally drag-n-drop. (4)The street value of every piece of information you can gather about a person is worth at least x2 what the cost of obtaining it is. The carriers aren’t going to sit back and watch billions of dollars worth of revenue zip past merrily on fiber lines – they want a piece of that pie. (5) They aren’t looking for cheating spouses. They want demographic info – as detailed (and targeted) as they can find it. What’s being questioned here is the integrity of people who have access to personal information. If it becomes a precedent that *anyone* can freely harvest and sell any personal data they come in contact with, then privacy standards like Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA are toothless.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 21:32:00 +0000

Mining Data will only server the miner if the data entered is correct and or the one entering the data is genuine. Remember there are many ways to enter and leave the rabbit hole.

By: Jon14688

Jon14688 — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 21:24:00 +0000

Our FBI – The fake tower – a device called Stingray – tricks wireless devices to
connect to it by spoofing legitimate cell phone towers, attracting phone
signals before passing them back to legitimate towers to evade
detection “The FBI has previously insisted that they don’t need a warrant to conduct utilize the technology” Even if your are at home using your phone.

By: Sean Phillips

Sean Phillips — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 21:04:00 +0000

Carrier IQ wrote the breached data to the log – which allows every application access. Your reply is short sighted.

By: James

James — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 21:01:00 +0000

You were doing just fine until your last sentence.

As if being spied by American companies wasn’t enough, you want your life spied on by the Chinese government?

Imbecile.

By: Sean Phillips

Sean Phillips — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 21:00:00 +0000

No you are way off. The messages showed the class that was processing all the messages to be one of the Carrier IQ classes.

By: Chris Lundberg

Chris Lundberg — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 21:00:00 +0000

It seems like a would be a better sales tool than a tech support thing. When u call them they have no cluse on how to fix your phone they just replace it.

By: Chris Lundberg

Chris Lundberg — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 20:57:00 +0000

the user will pay the bill as a new special tax.

By: Chris Lundberg

Chris Lundberg — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 20:54:00 +0000

All cell phones are tested by the carrier before they are sold to the customer to make sure there will have no issues. When a cell phone is turned on it connects to the tower thats nearby and the hardware detects if there is a drop cal beyond that there is no reason for the caririer to screen beyond that as they dont support the 3rd party apps that are on your cell and really dont need to know what you where doing before it went down. I worked in tech support and we didnt have access to this software my guess its the higher ups are using this data for sale purposes not for troubleshooting. They can see which software is used most offen and also track ur location . My thought is to buy a china phone so u wont have to worry about it.

By: Sean Phillips

Sean Phillips — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 20:51:00 +0000

That is not at all what is being talked about here, you have software planted on the phone intercepting and then transmitting them – completely different. Besides the demonstration shows the user doing a search in using SSL and the Carrier IQ getting the NON ENCRYPTED data from the application subverting the scrambling part. Thanks for the supporting evidence that what they are doing is illegal.