Friday, December 02, 2011

CarrierIQ Responds

Posted here in the interest of fairness - Carrier IQ's official response to allegations of wiretapping and spyware.

“The software receives a huge amount of information from the operating system,” Andrew Coward, Carrier IQ’s VP of marketing, told AllThingsD. “But just because it receives it doesn’t mean that it’s being used to gather intelligence about the user or passed along to the carrier.”

“It’s the operator that determines what data is collected,” says Carrier IQ CEO Larry Lenhart. “They make that decision based on their privacy standards and their agreement with their users, and we implement it.”
The operating system makers blame the carriers. The hardware makers blame the carriers. The software company itself blames the carriers. Verizon says "not us!" This may not be a good holiday season to be a cellular company that sells smart phones.

2 comments:

quizwedge said...

My take on Verizon's "not us!" statement was that they don't use Carrier IQ on their phones, not that they shouldn't be blamed. Did I miss something?

Of course, I also took the statement to mean, "Of course we don't use Carrier IQ. We use something else."

Nomad said...

Wedge,

I think you're splitting hairs there. The point of the statement was to get VZW out of the crossfire by any means necessary.

But I suspect you're right about them having their own methods. Odds are if there are any Attorney General inquiries (and there will be, this is red meat for re-election) we'll find out they're tracking far more info about us by all kinds of means than we ever imagined.

And when someone tries to pass a law against it, someone on the FBI will say "But that info is CRITICAL to ongoing investigations!" proving that they really were playing Big Brother.

- Mark

P.S. Sigh!