There’s a good chance that your smart phone is loaded with root-level spyware installed—not by a malicious internet source, but by your phone provider. Find out how to detect and remove it to increase performance and privacy.
Background: the web has been abuzz for the last week with talk of Caller IQ, a root-level application installed on millions of smart phones including most Android smart phones, BlackBerry units, and iPhones. Not all phones are affected, and at least Verizon has denied using Caller IQ on any of their phones, but there are plenty of phones which are.
The above video is a demonstration by Trevor Eckhart, the Android developer that discovered the application and publicized what it was up to–watch the video to get a better feel for the reach this application has.
The application has sweeping privileges and can access everything you do on your phone. Although cell providers have denied using the application for anything malicious the reality is that the app is quite capable of enabling deep level surveillance without any indication to the end user that their privacy is being compromised.
We don’t know about you, but we’re not comfortable taking the word of a company that they’re not accessing our private data, text messages, and other phone contents when Caller IQ makes it trivially easy to do so–and to remain completely undetected in the process. So the best case scenario is that your provider is not actively collecting data on you, but the Caller IQ rootkit is wasting precious battery life and clock cycles; the worst case scenario is that, unbeknownst to you, it’s radically compromising your privacy in ways you never authorized.
iPhone users have it easy; they can simply navigate to Settings -> General -> About -> Diagnostics and Usage and then toggle it to “Don’t Send”. Android users will need to dig much deeper: if you’re ready to check your phone and remove the Caller IQ installation (something you can’t do simply by uninstalling an app from your system menu as the carriers have made the application invisible to the end user) we highly recommend checking out Lifehacker’s thorough write up covering detection and removal at the link below.
More information about Carrier IQ. If youd like to talk about it, post below, tweet with #CIQ or if you have a board discussion about it post the URL here. I will be doing NO moderation.
While your out there thank the @EFF for letting me continue :)
Why are you looking at CarrierIQ for information and not HTC? Look at how many devices have Carrier IQ hidden. HTC is just including 3rd party software. They have privacy policies everywhere for their programs, this is not just an HTC/Android issue.
Visit http://androidsecuritytest.com/features/logs-and-services/loggers/carrieriq/c... for more info.
Videos were shot with E4G/E3D, so dont complain about quality.. If you want a better shot of something let me know!
Video Contents:
Part 1 - Start - Device setup
Part 2 - 3:15 - Where we don't see CIQ
Part 3 - 5:05 - Finding CIQ Application
Part 4 - 8:34 - Watching Carrier IQ Watch Us
8:39 - Keypresses
12:27 - Receiving a SMS Message
13:35 - Using Browser on WiFi
Part 5 - 15:45 - Carrier IQ on an out of service device
Part 6 - 16:49 - Conclusions
Go check out sassibob over at TweetFind too - http://blog.tweetfind.com/carrier-iq-occupycarriers.html
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