Slashdot Mirror
Carrier IQ Drama Continues
alphadogg writes "A Cornell University professor is calling the controversial Carrier IQ smartphone software revelations a privacy disaster. 'This is my worst nightmare,' says Stephen Wicker, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell. 'As a professor who studies electronic security, this is everything that I have been working against for the last 10 years. It is an utterly appalling invasion of privacy with immense potential for manipulation and privacy theft that requires immediate federal intervention.'" Read on for a grab-bag of other news about the ongoing story of Carrier IQ's spyware.
Federal intervention is already on the menu; new submitter mitcheli writes "Following the video from Trevor Eckhart on Youtube after the filing of the Cease and Desist letter and subsequent reply by the EFF and apology letter (as reported on Slashdot), Senator Franken of the Subcommittee on Privacy Technology and the Law asks some rather pointed questions."
Franken has more reason, apparently, to look into this than might legislators in other countries; an anonymous reader submits news that Cambridge researchers have found the software to be confined to (or at least only confirmed in) American customers' phones. From their report: "We performed an analysis on our dataset of 5572 Android smartphones that volunteers from all over the world helped us create. From those 5572 devices, only 21 were found to be running the software, all of them in the US and Puerto Rico. The affected carriers we observed were AT&T, Boost Mobile and Sprint.
We found no evidence of the Carrier IQ software running on Android devices in any other country."
Another anonymous reader suggests that "Apart from anything else, the fundamental mistake that Carrier IQ made was attempting to silence a developer using a heavy-handed legal threat. Certainly this was the tipping point in terms of bring the whole incident to the public's attention."
Like apparently begets like; reader adeelarshad82 writes "Not surprisingly, the Carrier IQ controversy has resulted in some legal action. Class-action lawsuits have been filed in California and Missouri that accuse Carrier IQ, as well as Samsung and HTC, of violating federal wiretap laws. The California case was filed on behalf of four smartphone users with HTC and Samsung devices and accuses the companies of violating the Federal Wiretap Act, which prohibits the unauthorized interception or illegal use of electronic communications, and California's Unfair Business Practice Act."
Finally, GMGruman writes with the cautionary note that Carrier IQ and Facebook pose "the least of your privacy threats": "[S]o far these forms of monitoring anonymize the data, so an individual's actual privacy is not invaded. And while people fret over these potential invasions, a more pernicious privacy invasion is under way, one that monitors actual individuals and then uses that information to try to direct their behavior. For example, car insurers give monitoring boxes to customers to track their driving behavior and offer a discount if it is 'good.' Of course, the flip side is higher rates or no coverage if the black box decides you are "bad." And, as this blog post points out, this is just one of many such 'Big Brother corporation' efforts out there that give significant power to insurers and others who have a history of abusing personal information, such as for redlining and coverage denial."
Franken has more reason, apparently, to look into this than might legislators in other countries; an anonymous reader submits news that Cambridge researchers have found the software to be confined to (or at least only confirmed in) American customers' phones. From their report: "We performed an analysis on our dataset of 5572 Android smartphones that volunteers from all over the world helped us create. From those 5572 devices, only 21 were found to be running the software, all of them in the US and Puerto Rico. The affected carriers we observed were AT&T, Boost Mobile and Sprint.
We found no evidence of the Carrier IQ software running on Android devices in any other country."
Another anonymous reader suggests that "Apart from anything else, the fundamental mistake that Carrier IQ made was attempting to silence a developer using a heavy-handed legal threat. Certainly this was the tipping point in terms of bring the whole incident to the public's attention."
Like apparently begets like; reader adeelarshad82 writes "Not surprisingly, the Carrier IQ controversy has resulted in some legal action. Class-action lawsuits have been filed in California and Missouri that accuse Carrier IQ, as well as Samsung and HTC, of violating federal wiretap laws. The California case was filed on behalf of four smartphone users with HTC and Samsung devices and accuses the companies of violating the Federal Wiretap Act, which prohibits the unauthorized interception or illegal use of electronic communications, and California's Unfair Business Practice Act."
Finally, GMGruman writes with the cautionary note that Carrier IQ and Facebook pose "the least of your privacy threats": "[S]o far these forms of monitoring anonymize the data, so an individual's actual privacy is not invaded. And while people fret over these potential invasions, a more pernicious privacy invasion is under way, one that monitors actual individuals and then uses that information to try to direct their behavior. For example, car insurers give monitoring boxes to customers to track their driving behavior and offer a discount if it is 'good.' Of course, the flip side is higher rates or no coverage if the black box decides you are "bad." And, as this blog post points out, this is just one of many such 'Big Brother corporation' efforts out there that give significant power to insurers and others who have a history of abusing personal information, such as for redlining and coverage denial."
Isn't it interesting that the only OS that sent the info out by default was Android? iPhone didn't. While they were there too, Carrier IQ was disabled by default.
And after all, Carrier IQ was just Google Analytics to mobiles. I can just hope that people start the same kind of uproar once they realize how much Google is spying them. If it's not allowed on mobiles, I don't see why it should be allowed on our computers and internet. Maybe there's still some hope in humankind.
i'd enjoy a miniture football helmet for my penis
wahoo!
Fucking useless droid garbage!
We need government intervention they claim; right up until the next revelation is that Carrier IQ's biggest client is the United States government. Whoopsies!
Dice, chops, and minces in seconds. Never need to switch blades. Chop up vegetables, nuts, and fruits. Easy to clean. Dishwasher safe. As seen on TV.
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Very good question from the senator:
Does Carrier IQ believe that its actions comply with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. Â 1030)? Why?
That's the kind of question you don't want to be asked. People don't ask that way if they don't already have an opinion. Basically, he wants to see them dig their own grave, and enjoy it.
That's good news. Let's see if they spring the lobby machine into overdrive and try to get the issue "lost" in sub-comittees and extended deadlines.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
the problem is transparency.
If not Carrier IQ what next? What information are they gathering? What's the performance cost with this thing running in the background?
Somewhere in the back of my head Richard M. Stallman is laughing(and eating foot fungus).
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Is why I still use a "dumb" phone and keep my landline. I was originally concerned about hacks and privacy invasion from outside threats. The Windows experience has proven that no publicly networked device can be safe from threats. But the providers can get away with this shit, even more than the gangsters.
Wrong. Apple install it by default and even obfuscate the files.
Wrong yourself, or at least misleading - The carrier IQ that Apple ships with does not record anything at all by default, and even if you could figure out how to enable it records only a tiny bit of data, no keystrokes or SMS for example...
Nor do they obfuscate anything (unless you call shipping with it off a form of obfuscation).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Maybe this clusterfuck is big enough to point out to users the security risks of the android & iphone platform.
When you have your entire life accessible from your smartphone, you need your smartphone to be audited & certified. Go buy a blackberry:
http://us.blackberry.com/ataglance/security/certifications.jsp
But why is are not the Telecoms on the noise???? they are the ones using the weapon, CIQ is only the manufacturer!!!!
Let's assume that the carriers put a clause in their agreements that authorizes them to collect and analyze all data. What happens if all carriers do this with all phones? If the only option is to not carry a phone, is there really an option?
That's why this needs to end up with a law that requires carriers to provide a real opt-out.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Skeptics find flaws in Carrier IQ application analysis
As I posted in another forum, the court of public opinion isn't in complete agreement.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Where are those skilled network hackers who reads and comments to slashdot, and who would do tests does CarrierIQ send data over network?
Would it be possible to test with WLAN sniffing? Collectin data from specific period, like one week and check what it actually brings up?
Let's not forget about the incredible risk brave whistleblowers took on to let us know that the federal government is copying ALL internet an phone traffic and keeping information on ALL US citizens without anonymizing ANYTHING.
They've likely served all of your service providers and google, yahoo etc with thousands of secret letters that force them to divulge information on YOU and also compell them on pain of prison, not to divulge the existence of the letters. These letters can be served to anyone, a financial institution, a pharmacy, a drug company, your employer, your doctor, your LAWYER, your old priest. They can be served in person or electronically by the hundreds.
The federal government can declare a US CITIZEN an enemy combatant without any oversight, deprive him or her of all their constitutional rights and even KILL them without due process on foreign OR US soil. What if someday soon they chose to do this to people who disagreed with them politically?
Don't forget the most inciduous enemy.
Vote for Ron Paul or someone who agrees with the same policies. Don't vote for the status quo, the above is now the status quo.
End the FED.
Liberty.
If CIQ is found guilty what would happen with the extra costs people paid while sending all that information without its knowledge?
So it looks like T-Mobile is the only "good" carrier here that doesn't install such spyware.
Lets see the other carriers burn for this because it's pretty much all their fault for installing this potentially illegal software.
Sad to say, but this probably falls under what is a reasonable expectation of privacy. I'd expect this to be covered deep down in a EULA somewhere. Honestly, folks, what do you expect? Haven't you been listening to anything? Did you read your EULA? We'll be indignant for a week or two and then go back to worrying about what the Kardashians are doing (via our smartphones, of course). Remember, if you are not doing anything illegal, then you don't have anything to worry about!
Absolutely the worst. After PROMIS, Echelon, all the trojans, worms, loggers, loaders, spam, commercial datamining, geolocation, auto-celltracking, the end of Magnas Cartae, Civil Rights, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, The Geneva Convention and its multiples, The Nurenberg Trials, ... and all the rest.
How shocking!. Shocking!
Ah, just hang the CEOs, marketdrones, white-collar collaborators in general, and their financiers up by their thumbs. Tar and feather them, Then Send them to Texas. Fair's fair.
Is the reason any company would think they could get away with this.
>> It is an utterly appalling invasion of privacy with immense potential for
>> manipulation and privacy theft that requires immediate federal intervention.'"
Why would the Federal Gov't intervene? Seems like a capability tailor-made for use in surveillance by three-letter agencies.
sPh
After all, your carrier already knows what numbers you are communicating with, how often, for how long, and when. They know the text of the messages you send, as well. The only difference is now there is a company who you are not directly paying who is also watching what you're up to. I'm not saying I approve of it, but it really isn't that big of a change form my perspective. If your carrier just sold your calling records to someone, would it be this much of an issue?
Ultimately, any carrier that doesn't already have this kind of detailed information on every one of their customers is at the least irresponsible and more likely idiotic - and even more likely soon out of business. Even for the "unlimited" plans out there, it is still worthwhile for the companies to watch what is going on in order to properly position themselves for future changes in consumer and business phone use.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
As I'm sure you know: Without complete corresponding source code to all of the software running on a phone, you'll never know the answer to those questions.
RMS knew the solution to this problem before the problem became widespread (as he often does) and he got the solution right early on: this is a social problem, not a technological problem. The solution is software freedom for all computer users for all the software they run.
Sadly, the Carrier IQ debacle is unlikely to propel people to see this solution. The problem is too weak in its urgency because Carrier IQ's (or any other workalike) privacy violations are merely annoying or scary. Privacy violations usually don't kill or maim anyone. Also, the affected audience has low market value: the general public. When proprietary software used in internal medical devices fails and kills someone, there will be another opportunity to talk of software freedom as a social solution to be taken seriously. And, for a time, people will be more receptive to the idea that all computer users deserve software freedom. People seem to have no problem hiring professionals in other fields they don't understand (plumbers, doctors, lawyers, mechanics, builders) so it's not far-fetched to expect the public to hire computer programmers to inspect and modify programs on their behalf.
Digital Citizen
This is a link to the attorneys that are representing the national class action lawsuit.
http://www.hbsslaw.com/ciq/
... whackin' in Tangiers.
And now I'm out on the sole surviving with my Beatnik peers. Analog reel and a little distortion.
(etc.)
You agreed to all of this in that contract you signed for service.
Go away.
Having your device help the network provider is common. Your router does it and so does your smart phone. Whether you should trust the network provider or not is a completely different question.
This certainly doesn't have any more to do with wiretap laws than when AT&T listens into all your phone calls - since they can. Network providers are better because of tools like these.
Your ISP has the ability to listen in on almost all your web traffic too and that traffic is not legally protected anywhere near as much as voice traffic over cell and landlines. THAT'S what we should be pissed off about. Warrant-less ISP traffic monitoring.
Yes, they may have violated wiretapping law but I bet no one goes to jail and if there is a fine, it doesn't dent their profits. But these guys not only are above the law. They write it. There is a HBO Documentary called Hot Coffee I recommend. You remember the McDonald's coffee case? An old lady who bought a cup of coffee, recklessly drove off with it between her legs suing for $2M?
Turns out there is a whole other side to these stories. In her case the coffee really was too hot (scalding temperature), and the photos of her burns are really bad! Not superficial; I mean bad! She was in the parking lot *parked* when it happened, and she was a passenger. She had asked for was to cover medical costs of treating the burns, but McDonalds brushed her off. It was a jury that awarded the figure because there had been 700 other burn cases and McDonalds had done nothing. An arrogant McDonalds manager said "700? pfffft... surprised it isn't more." She settled for less than the awarded amount. They made her sign a gag order.
And after that they badmouthed her with other big companies to lobby successfully for 'tort reform' using this case. Sounds like a great idea until it happens to you. This really limits the ability of the public to hold corporations to account. So, they are above criminal law (corporations may be people, but you can't jail them) and above civil law thanks to tort reform.
we know that the EU is giving facebook flack for their privacy issues, so what do you think they are going to do to Carrier IQ?
i get the feeling that in a couple months we will see the a headline about Carrier IQ going under.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I honestly couldn't care less if logged SMS and keystrokes as long as it doesn't cost me on my data package. What I do care about is that it apparently sends unencrypted data about the encrypted site you may be surfing. Seems like this could be exploited for more nefarious purposes.
It's not just happening in the US. All the major carriers in Canada had initially denied having Carrier IQ on their phones (Rogers/Bell/Telus) but it has recently been found on the Rogers LG Phoenix.
http://mobilesyrup.com/2011/12/02/uh-oh-carrier-iq-found-on-the-rogers-lg-phoenix/
You can put anything on iPhone without a jailbreak
You just have to pay for a developer's license and enroll your phone.
What you don't get is the ability to to put any software you want on other people's phones by letting them download your application from your web site, you have to go through iTunes for that, and doing that requires Apple to approve your application. But when we get to that point, we've stopped talking about developer freedom and started talking about entrepreneurial freedom, which is something completely different.
PS: iPhones don't come with carrier crap installed; that's one of the reasons Apple didn't initially partner with Verizon; the other two reasons were the Qualcomm patent tax on CDMA hardware, and Verizon not wanting to set up a Visual Voice Mail service that met Apple's requirements.
PPS: All of the projects for running Linux on phones are only going to get somewhere if they break signature verification in the boot loaders, and the baseband software runs on a separate chip, rather than on the same chip as applications. That lets out a lot of smartphones (e.g. anything running a Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU). If they try to go ahead on those phones anyway, men in suits will show up citing the Code of Federal Regulations, 47, Section 2.944 covering Software Defined Radio.
-- Terry
A good chunk of developer freedom is tied up in distribution.
If you're allowed to develop, but not distribute, then your freedom as a developer has been compromised. Consider the various free applications available from the Cedega app installer - there's no entrepreneurial angle there.
Concerning the PS, yes, you're right. Apple is likely the one exception, since they're really the only ones who can get away with it.
Concerning the PPS, I'm honestly not expecting non-corporate Linux distros to "get anywhere" on phones anyway, due to a lot of other reasons, but there's plenty of phones out there without integrated radios. I imagine hobbyist distros will be developed for phones as long as there are phones for them to be developed on.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Perhaps the CIQ log is not transmitted in realtime... Perhaps, the log is sent "on request" for example when big brother wants to see what you've been up to... if they have a legal wiretap they simply pull your ciq log.
IMO people who demonize CIQ are missing the target. You should demonize the companies who employed CIQ technology to spy on their customers.
The only thing CIQ is guilty of is being a for-profit company in a capitalist society. Where there is demand (AT&T, HTC, Samsung, Motorola) there will be supply (CIQ). Just like the spam issue.
If you don't existinguish the demand by penalizing CIQ's customers, perhaps through legislature, CIQ 2.0 will be incorporated in no time and you better believe the next root kit will be a lot harder to detect.
AB
smattawichu
A good chunk of developer freedom is tied up in distribution.
If you're allowed to develop, but not distribute, then your freedom as a developer has been compromised. Consider the various free applications available from the Cedega app installer - there's no entrepreneurial angle there.
There would be nothing from stopping you distributing your code for an iOS app. In order for your "users" to install it though, they would need to pay the $99 fee for a developer license or be jailbroken. Your right as a developer to distribute software is still there, not very conveniently though but there none the less.
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
Here in CH my family has in total 4 Android phones. None of them has CIQ. Possibly because we bought them directly and not through service plans. I don't know whether phones with service plans do have CIQ installed. My hunch is that a scandal would break out should such a practice be discovered here in CH. Or in neighbouring EU countries where privacy is highly considered, like DE for instance.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I checked my Samsung Captivate yesterday (on AT&T network). No CarrierIQ files were found. (my phone is rooted too).
Also checked my wife's phone, nothing there either.
A good chunk of developer freedom is tied up in distribution.
If you're allowed to develop, but not distribute, then your freedom as a developer has been compromised. Consider the various free applications available from the Cedega app installer - there's no entrepreneurial angle there.
There would be nothing from stopping you distributing your code for an iOS app. In order for your "users" to install it though, they would need to pay the $99 fee for a developer license or be jailbroken. Your right as a developer to distribute software is still there, not very conveniently though but there none the less.
Not really, at least not in any meaningful sense. Just like how copyright law allows you to make duplicates of copyrighted material for personal use ... but denies you the right to acquire the tools needed to do that in most cases. A right that you have but do not have the power to exercise is not a right but is, in the end, a privilege. On that may be revoked at any time.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Well stability of any performance tool is key.
Here is a big NOT ready for anything critical.
09-02 20:08:45.976 W/ActivityManager(2487)Scheduling restart of crashed service com.att.android.markthespot/com.carrieriq.att.service.IQService in 44984ms
Samsung hardware....
.. because it means people have started to care again about privacy after years of brainwashing by self-interested parties such as the UK and US governments and companies like Facebook and Google. The latter happily profited from what can be called as the biggest assault on privacy in decades.
Carrier IQ is far from the only company doing what it does, but keep in mind they do so because there is a market for it. Follow the money..
Insert