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.

Comments

Sounds cool

[Toe, The]

I am currently on the fence trying to decide between Sprint and Verizon. I think Sprint just tipped me to their side with this.

Re:Sounds cool

[gman003]

Uh, unless something's changed, Verizon never had CarrierIQ to begin with. If you're concerned about it, I think "never did it" trumps "stopped doing it when they got caught".

Re:Sounds cool

[Tanktalus]

Well, that depends. On why Verizon never had CarrierIQ.

If it's because "we looked at it, and thought it a gross violation of our customers' privacy" then, yes, "never did it" trumps.

However, if it's because Verizon has not yet managed to get the required hardware to support the volume of data that CarrierIQ produces, combined with the analytics systems required to make bottom-line-driven decisions with that information, then, no, "never did it (yet)" does not trump. In fact, it loses, big time. Sprint, having gone down that road, sunk a bunch of money on it, and abandoned it, is the clear winner as they're unlikely to do it a second time. Verizon may still be looking at implementing it/rolling it out.

I'm not saying that's the case. I'm saying it's a possible scenario that fits with the known facts (very few in this thread) where "never did it" does not trump "stopped doing it". I don't have any idea how likely either scenario is.

Re:Sounds cool

[msauve]

"what's to say that they don't have a homegrown version of software that does the exact same thing"

Based on their website, if they did I would feel secure that it didn't work properly.

Re:Sounds cool

[ColdWetDog]

And even if they didn't use CarrierIQ, what's to say that they don't have a homegrown version of software that does the exact same thing?

If Verizon tried to home brew software as complex as CarrierIQ, their phones wouldn't even boot up.

Not a chance.

Re:Sounds cool

[liquidhokie]

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...

...couldn't those vans also spy on every packet going through the cell they were testing? I'm not suggesting they are, or if that would be on any use. But they certainly have the necessary equipment in those special vans. Paint the vans black... and... wow, I don't want to think about it.

Re:Sounds cool

[scubamage]

A separate out-of-band piece of hardware running snmp is common place in carrier's, and in high end systems. How else do you think cable carriers control set top boxes? Its defined by packetcable and docsis specs. How else do you think iLOM, aLOM, iLO, and DRAC can provide SNMP statistics for the boxes they're embedded in? Read more before you call someone an idiot. SNMP is frequently used out of band, specifically when you don't want an end user to be screwing with things. Try working in a fortune 500 carrier and you'll learn a bit more about it.

Carrier IQ

[Dan East]

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.

Exactly my first thought

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Hands in the Cookie jar?

[bobbied]

I think they just got caught with their hand in the cookie jar and wisely decided to let go of the cookie. I'm guessing that their corporate lawyer types who are dealing with the lawsuits recommended this happen ASAP and management is following their lawyers'' advice. The question now is will all the crumbs laying around lead to them being punished or just sent to bed without dinner.