It’s a good thing that the EFF has waded into the battle against Carrier IQ – the weaselly company that makes even Smeagle of LOTR fame seem upright and forthcoming.
You can catch up on carriergate here, or if you are averse to long passages of reading you can also look at a summary here: Schneier on Security… and then after all that you too can ponder on how relatively calm the people with the most to lose are being.
Update: watch vid of US Senator Al Franken quizzing an FBI pointy-haired about its use of CarrierIQ data. The answer is just… well, preciousssss. Vid after the jump:
Jeepers.
While I personally don’t have any exciting bits of information flying into and out of my smartphone, I’d have thought companies/business folk in general would’ve been up in arms about this, all over the world. They’re the ones with the most information to protect, with the most people using smartphones. Do they really think the security options on their beloved Exchange servers trump a keystroke logger on a faraway, not-entirely-controlled endpoint like a smartphone? A very strange non-reaction, this… however you slice it.
But to be honest we’ve *all* been a tad calm. Barring a few technophilic privacy advocates and the class action suits, CarrierIQ almost got away with all of this… and it might yet weather the storm. Because we (the casual cellphone users) reason to ourselves that ‘well, practically EVERYONE in the world has a smartphone these days, so we’re all equally exposed, right?‘ Yep. As always, the simple idea of ‘togetherness’ is strangely pacifying… ‘equality’ just scalpels past the more skeptical portions of the cortex to get to the parts that make us feel warm and comforted. Un-alone. And anyway, what can the average user do about any of this? Most of this stuff is over our heads.
Still. If you can be arsed, download Carrier IQ Detector from the Google apps store (i’m sure there’s bound to be variants for other mobile platforms?) and sate your curiousity once and for all. If you *do* have CIQ installed, and aren’t convinced that your telco should be handed this much insight into what you do on your own phone, even for market and product research purposes, then by all means go surfing on the rest of http://www.xda-developers.com to figure out what your options are.