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Sprint Orders All OEMs To Strip Carrier IQ From Their Phones

Posted by Soulskill on from the don't-want-the-bad-pr dept.

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.

2 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds cool by Toe,+The · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  2. Exactly my first thought by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.