So Carrier IQ isn't going away quietly, and honestly I didn't expect it to. Two weeks ago this was just Trevor Eckhart's video making the rounds on Android forums — the one where he's tapping numbers into a dialer and you can watch a background process log every keystroke like it's taking notes for a term paper. Now it's a full-blown mess with lawyers, senators, and a bunch of very carefully worded corporate statements. I've been refreshing this story more than I probably should.
Quick recap for anyone who missed it: Carrier IQ makes diagnostic software that ships pre-installed on a huge number of phones — Android, BlackBerry, some others, and it turns out the thing logs way more than "diagnostics" usually implies. Eckhart posted research on it back on November 12th, Carrier IQ responded by sending him a cease-and-desist letter (a genuinely baffling move, legally speaking), the EFF jumped in on his behalf, and Carrier IQ backed off and apologized about a week later. That whole sequence alone tells you they knew this looked bad.
What's changed since is that the carriers can't hide behind "no comment" anymore. Sprint has confirmed it uses Carrier IQ on its phones, though it's insisting the data is used for network diagnostics and isn't sold to anyone. AT&T said basically the same thing. T-Mobile too. Verizon, interestingly, says it doesn't use Carrier IQ at all, which is the kind of detail that makes you wonder why the others didn't just say no too if it were that easy. Apple put out a statement saying it stopped supporting Carrier IQ in most devices as of iOS 5 (which, remember, came out back in October alongside the 4S) and that it'll be removed completely in a future software update. That's a pretty clear signal from Apple about which way the wind is blowing, even if they're not exactly admitting fault.
And now Congress is in it. Senator Al Franken, who chairs the Senate Judiciary subcommittee that deals with privacy, sent Carrier IQ a formal letter this week demanding answers. What exactly gets logged, who has access to it, whether it's been handed over to law enforcement, that kind of thing. He's given them a deadline to respond. I don't know if anything meaningful comes out of a congressional letter, historically these things go one of two ways, either it forces real disclosure or it turns into a hearing where everyone reads prepared statements and nothing changes. But the fact that a sitting senator is treating this as worth his letterhead tells you this jumped way past "tech blog controversy" territory in about ten days flat.
Here's the part that actually bugs me more than the logging itself: nobody asked. I get that carriers want diagnostic data, dropped calls are annoying and they need to know where their network is failing. Fine. But there's a difference between "tell us your signal strength when a call drops" and whatever Carrier IQ is actually capturing, and the fact that this was buried invisibly on millions of phones with zero disclosure is the actual scandal. Not that logging exists. That nobody thought regular people deserved to know about it.
(Side note, completely unrelated except that it's also a "software running on my phone that I didn't fully agree to" story: I finally set up my mom's new Kindle Fire this week and Amazon's app store situation is its own small headache. Not the same league as this obviously, just noting that 2011 has been a rough year for "wait, what is my device actually doing.")
I don't think this ends with Carrier IQ shutting down. My guess is they survive this as a company, maybe rebrand the software a little, add an opt-in screen nobody reads, and carriers quietly keep using something similar under a different name in eighteen months. But I'll be surprised if AT&T and Sprint don't face at least a couple of lawsuits out of this before the year's out. The ambulance chasers have to be drafting complaints right now. Worth keeping an eye on whether Franken's letter actually gets a real response or just a PR-department non-answer, because that'll tell you a lot about how seriously anyone in this chain is taking it.