Carrier IQ Speaks: Our Software Ignores Your Personal Info
“What the Eckhart video demonstrates is that there’s a great deal of information available on a handset,” says Coward. “What it doesn’t show is that all information is processed, stored, or forwarded out of the device.”
Okay. Then what information is being captured and passed along to the carriers who use Carrier IQ? Data related to call quality, battery life, device crashes — everything you’d expect, really.
“If there’s a dropped call, the carriers want to know about it,” says Coward. “So we record where you were when the call dropped, and the location of the tower being used. … Similarly, if you send an SMS to me and it doesn’t go through, the carriers want to know that, too. And they want to know why — if it’s a problem with your handset or the network.”
And Coward is quick to point out that CIQ isn’t doing anything nefarious with our text messages, either.
“We don’t read SMS messages. We see them come in. We see the phone numbers attached to them. But we are not storing, analyzing or otherwise processing the contents of those messages.”
The same is true of Web site URLs. CIQ has the ability to capture them, but not the associated content. So it might note a device having trouble accessing Facebook, but not the content on Facebook itself.
Which is reassuring. That said, CIQ still has the ability to capture a wide variety of user data. So who is determining what exactly is being collected?
The carriers. They decide what’s to be collected and how long it’s stored — typically about 30 days. And according to Carrier IQ, the data is in their control the whole time.
Everyone is pointing the finger at everyone else. This is typically what happens when people or companies get caught red-handed doing something they know is wrong.
