This is as bad as it gets. Longer term I hope there is better regulation of such things. The mobile industry is so naive about consequences of such thing. The PC world learned it the hard way and these people will too.
BTW, my Droid X does not have it. And folks have found references to Carrier IQ on iPhone although it doesn't appear that it runs by default.
Incredible how easy it seems to have been for a company to do this. I wonder how much the public gets or gets explained to them how much info on them exists in databases.
Though this story may fall a bit outside the debate, after 9/11, the tug of war between privacy and security concerns has gotten amped way up. There are elements of the Patriot Act that would have been summarily rejected not too long ago.
This is as bad as it gets. Longer term I hope there is better regulation of such things. The mobile industry is so naive about consequences of such thing. The PC world learned it the hard way and these people will too.
BTW, my Droid X does not have it. And folks have found references to Carrier IQ on iPhone although it doesn't appear that it runs by default.
Agree but not sure if this issue will ever be fully resolved as profiling-behaviour recording spending consumers is worth a lot of money as seen and still done by supermarkets.
A modern example happening again within PC world-gaming is that of Electronic Arts and their digital store-download of games.
The T&C gives them permission to go through the whole machine and use the information for and with marketing 3rd parties.
This has kicked up a stink with quite a few, and yet the response is if you do not like it then do not install and use the digital store.
Thankfully this was seen in their T&C but not exactly made easily visible to the consumer.
Sadly I am sure there are many examples that still happen throughout the many sectors involving consumers.
Information is worth a lot of money these days, as being noticed with medical patient records being one of concern more recently and whether it can be linked back to an individual when data is sold on to 3rd parties.
The key here is to notify the user. Without it, they will get hit hard. If there is a privacy policy, then the heat is gone. But of course, a privacy policy cannot ever be as scary as what this thing is doing even reporting your keystrokes on your phone, which web site you went to, the works. It makes a mockery of our privacy. I am pretty sure there is strong backlash and this usage will get curtailed.
Agreed, the notification of the software and the option to disable is the key. I expect a strong backlash on this is as well as the story spreads out thru the press.
No disagreement from me.
But they know such monitoring kicks up a stink and hence they bury any notice to the user in a tricky to find area.
That said I appreciate the IQ software may not be in any T&C and would be very naughty (well to me I hate all of this type of marketing capturing data even those done at supermarkets on their discount cards-internet purchase-etc), but then this comes down to carefully analysing T&C for the OEM aspect of the software, the carrier,etc.
That said even with all the stink it makes, companies still do it as I showed with the multi billion market of games, and the online connection service the big ones provide for PC-Xbox-PS3 games (not talking MMOG)
Years ago we worked with a company that does the various software for box sets for certain services-companies (cannot name them), I do remember they also had the ability to do similar marketing capturing and sent it back to the service head office, of course this relies on some way for sending the data but the function was there.
No idea if that still exists but would not be at all surprised with the latest box set used for satellite-broadband TV.
Cheers
Orb
Looks like AT&T and Sprint are the two carriers with phones that have this on them. Good news is that some analysis is showing that while the app gets called on all of those activities, it doesn't store them or transmit them.
.
