Developer Reveals Hidden Carrier IQ Smartphone App Logging Everything You Do
What you're about to see may send you into a fireball of fury, but before you have a triple heart attack, know this: though this app you might never have heard of is likely currently logging every keystroke you make, they're almost certainly not using your information for anything ill-willed. Of course that's no consolation for the idea that a number of HTC, Samsung, Nokia, and RIM (BlackBerry) phones have this software embedded in them, this perhaps proving the late Steve Jobs right when he said Android keeps track of everything you do — and what is the response on the part of the Carrier IQ crew? They've tried to sue the fellow who exposed how their application works.
This developer who revealed the information we're speaking about today goes by the name T.Eckhard and showed his findings off first in the XDA Developer Forums. Once his first findings were found by Carrier IQ (again, an app that runs in the background that you may never have known is on your device right this second), they threatened legal action against him. When they found that legal threats weren't going to do them any good, they sent out word to the public that their software does not record keystrokes or other personal information. What we're to understand today if Eckhard's findings are true is that this claim was quite simply incorrect.
What Carrier IQ's software does is to collect information from your device on its inner workings and on how you use it daily and sends that information to the carrier it is housed on so that they might identify and fix problems with their networks as they appear. Sounds innocent enough, right? That's not the problem here, ladies and gentlemen, the problem is that with the information this background software is collecting, hackers could possibly have access to the passwords you tap in on the daily. Use a bank account from your smartphone? Could be trouble!
We're currently sending out lines to contacts in both the manufacturing and carrier worlds as we speak, and should hear back from them soon. So far we're to understand that Verizon does not use Carrier IQ's software in any way – let's hope we hear similar things from the rest.
[via Android Community]