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Sprint Orders All OEMs To Strip Carrier IQ From Their Phones
An anonymous reader writes with a report that Sprint, in an attempt to extricate itself from the Carrier IQ drama, has "ordered that all of their hardware partners remove the Carrier IQ software from Sprint devices as soon as possible." Sprint confirmed that they've disabled the use of Carrier IQ on their end, saying, "diagnostic information and data is no longer being collected." The software is currently installed on roughly 26 million Sprint phones, though the company has only been collecting data from 1.3 million of them.
I'd hate to work for and / or have a stake in Carrier IQ. Talk about going down in a massive ball of flames overnight! Simply put, that company, at least by name, will have to cease to exist. No one would dare want that name associated with their devices.
Better known as 318230.
That was my first thought when I read the headline: what have the replaced it with?
They're apparently doing this in order to avoid being dragged in front on Congress and not out of any sort of altruism. (OK, so no one thought they were doing it out of altruism, but you may have thought they were trying to avoid alienating customers. Nope. They just want Congress to drop the issue.)
The article itself makes it pretty clear that they expect that Sprint is simply going to switch to some other software. It's kind of like how the iPhone "doesn't run CarrierIQ as of iOS 5." Well, of course it doesn't - Apple moved all of that stuff into iOS 5 itself. It's built-in to the OS now. All that CarrierIQ information is still gathered, and still sent back to Apple.
But that's OK. Remember when people were upset about the iPhone tracking you? That's a "feature" in iOS 5. Essentially, by allowing you to "track" yourself and your friends, Apple managed to turn "we constantly track and record your location" into a bullet point feature. (Not joking! Yes, you have to "opt in" to be allowed to see the data that Apple gathers about you. That's nice. They still gather it if you have the features turned off, you just aren't allowed to use that data yourself.)
So I fully expect that a couple of weeks after the "remove CarrierIQ update" is released, security researchers will discover Sprint phones now come with some new software with a different name that does the exact same thing.
I've been a long time Sprint customer. About 10 years ago, the experience was pretty miserable - they screwed up my account numerous times. But I stuck through it. Now, I honestly wouldn't go elsewhere. They still offer true unlimited data, they're getting better handsets, and their support has gotten much, much better. Sadly they cancelled their premier rewards program this past year, but I honestly never used any of the benefits. They're, on the whole, the most pleasant of the carriers I've had to deal with.
Uh, unless something's changed, Verizon never had CarrierIQ to begin with.
Unless something's changed, VZW has denied using CarrierIQ, but has refused to explain why CarrierIQ was found to be connecting to servers with "vzw" in their names.
As a VZW customer, I'd be shocked if VZW wasn't doing something nefarious when it comes to customer monitoring. I'd also fully expect them to then lie about it.
Note well: This doesn't mean I'd trust Sprint (or AT&T or T-Mobile or whoever) over VZW. I wouldn't trust any of them.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
When this whole CarrierIQ thing got started, I thought this was simply a diagnostic tool, yet conspiracy theorists were going to jump all over the "...but they could" aspects of the system. I also thought it was a shame, since the carriers and manufacturers ought to be able to monitor the system so they can improve it.
Your post has made me re-think all of my notions. I don't believe any nefarious purpose was afoot-- this was a tool intended to diagnose infrastructure and device performance. However, installing it as a rootkit is a bad call. It provides a vehicle for malware, and a description of its operation-- however technically accurate it migh be-- touches too many evil buzzwords. Such a tool, while useful, is eventually too easy to turn into a PR nightmare (obviously). Then throw the malware hijacking aspect in for good measure.
Verizon does it right, at least as we see it now. Those vans do a great job of real-world testing, where their test equipment is gathering the same metrics as CarrierIQ's software, but with test data nobody will whine about.
But...