Your Smartphone Is Spying on You and There's Nothing You Can Do About It
2011 Dec 3, 1:31pm 3,885 views 11 comments
Comments 1 - 11 of 11 Search these comments
Dan8267
2011 Dec 3, 2:06pm
The scumbag felons at Carrier IQ also sent the hero, Eckhart, who discover their malfeasance the following cease-and-desist letter in which they falsely accused Eckhart of being in violation of copyright law.
Talk about hypocrisy. So evidence about illegal wire tapping is now copyrighted? Every person should send Carrier IQ a cease-and-desist letter telling them to stop violating wire-tapping laws, and to turn themselves in to the cops. What a bunch of scum bags.
Oh yeah, they also later backed down with the cease-and-desist when they realized how guilty it made them look.
Dan8267
2011 Dec 4, 4:12am
The article deals specifically with phones running the Android Operating System. However, Carrier IQ is found on all sorts of phones. Apple supposedly removed it from the IPhone after complaints, but I don't have an IPhone so I can't confirm. I have seen this on my HTC Evo.
Travis Bickle
2011 Dec 4, 8:13am
I posted a summary about this last week:
What I found particularly amusing was the response to Carrier IQ's cease-and-desist letter by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. A legal scolding to be sure....
Dan8267
2011 Dec 4, 10:09am
I posted a summary about this last week:
How did I miss that? Oh well, anyway the cease-and-desist note was basically a threat to take everything Eckharts had if he didn't say a bunch of lies that they told me to repeat verbatim. Yeah, that made Carrier IQ Corp look really bad.
Dan8267
2011 Dec 5, 1:36pm
I use Verizon and they are one of the companies that say that they don't use it (but are real iffy about whether they used it in the past).
You can always check to see if it's on your phone. The video shows an example for Android based phones, but I'm sure you can Google how to find out with other OSes.
curious2
2014 Apr 24, 4:31am
New models built with security and privacy in mind reflect the Zeitgeist of the Snowden era.
***
By summer [2014, Phil] Zimmermann will be delivering a new way to fight back: a highly secure smartphone, called Blackphone. Now being manufactured by a joint venture that includes Silent Circle, it uses Zimmermann’s encryption tools and adds other protections. It runs a special version of the Android operating system—PrivatOS—that blocks many of the ways phones leak data about your activities. While custom security phones have long been in the hands of military and government leaders, this effort may signal a shift toward mass-market phones that are far more private and secure."
Dan8267
2014 Apr 24, 6:05am
Ultraprivate Smartphones
Oh, it's possible to thwart spying, but I expect Congress will make any such secure phone -- one the government can't read -- illegal unless their is a backdoor for the government. Any popular secure means of communication, even an encrypted Skype, would be make illegal.
The solution has to start with kicking these scumbag politicians out of office and replacing them with people who care about privacy.
An Android developer recently discovered a clandestine application called Carrier IQ built into most smartphones that doesn't just track your location; it secretly records your keystrokes, and there's nothing you can do about it.
CarrierIQ collected lots data, including keystrokes, and there's no way for the user to opt out "without advanced knowledge."
It was even logging contents of text messages! Wired posted the video on Tuesday night and cemented CarrierIQ's status "as one of nine reasons to wear a tinfoil hat."
The video shows the software logging Eckhart's online search of “hello world.” That's despite Eckhart using the HTTPS version of Google which is supposed to hide searches from those who would want to spy by intercepting the traffic between a user and Google."
CARRIER IQ, Inc.
1200 Villa Street, Suite 200
Mountain View, CA 94041
Phone: +1 650 625 5400
Fax: +1 650 625 5435
Full article and scary video
That's right, a corporation called Carrier IQ is committing felony wire-tapping millions of times a day. This isn't a civil infraction. It's criminal behavior. If the executes got just 1 minute prison time for every illegal wire-tap they committed, they would have to serve their entire lives many times over. And that would be justice.
This evil program records your private conversations, hides itself, and costs you money every time it uses your data plan connection or dials your phone, which is has OS permissions to do. That's right. It makes you pay for it's violations of your fourth amendment rights and other rights under Federal anti-wiretapping laws. How does it feel to be Carrier IQ's bitch?
Hey Occupy Wall Street, why don't you occupy Carrier IQ?