Two lawsuits have been filed against mobile software company Carrier IQ in the wake of accusations that it could be misusing controversial tracking programs present in millions of Android, Nokia, and BlackBerry smartphones worldwide.
According to Jaikumar Vijayan of Computerworld, one of the two lawsuits was filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. This lawsuit accuses Carrier IQ, HTC Inc. and HTC America Inc. of “unlawfully intercepting communications from private mobile phones, smart phones and handsets,” Vijayan says.
The lawsuit was filed by Erin Janek, an HTC Android phone owner who Computerworld says has charged the software firm and the phone manufacturer of “surreptitiously monitoring and collecting data from Janek’s private communications on the phone without Janek’s permission or knowledge… The complaint notes that Carrier IQ and HTC’s actions raised questions about whether the data collected from Janek’s phone was protected under Federal Wiretap law and whether the interception of the data was intentional within the meaning of the law.”
The second lawsuit was filed in District Court for the Northern District of California on the behalf of four smartphone users. The legal filing accuses defendants HTC, Carrier IQ, and Samsung of “violating the Federal Wiretap Act as well as California’s Unfair Business Practice Act” and remains open, meaning that additional companies could ultimately be added to the suit.
The legal action comes following a 17-minute video recorded and posted to YouTube earlier this month by Connecticut security researcher Trevor Eckhart, who said that Control IQ — a piece of software developed by Carrier IQ — secretly tracked smartphone user activities.
According to reports, Eckhart said that the software tracks the location of the device, even is location services are disabled by the owner, and actually records each button press, search query, and text message send and received as well. To illustrate, Eckhart typed a text message saying “Hello World!” only for that content to instantly appear in his Android phone’s Control IQ application log.
“The Carrier IQ application is receiving not only HTTP strings directly from browser, but also HTTPs strings,” he said, referring to the program as a “rootkit” that spies on unsuspecting users. “HTTPs data is the only thing protecting much of the ‘secure’ Internet. Queries of what you search, HTTPs plain text login strings (yuck, but yes), even exact details of objects on page are shown in the JS/CSS/GIF files above – and can be seen going into the Carrier IQ application.”
Carrier IQ has denied the charges, and officials from the company told Mashable’s Peter Pachal that their products “makes your phone better” by delivering information on the handset’s performance to wireless operators.
While they added that there is a lot of information that is “available” to them on a user’s cellphone, they say that the “vigorously” disagree that their software violates wiretap laws and does not record or transmit any actual content, Pachal added.
“Our software does not record, store or transmit the contents of SMS messages, email, photographs, audio or video,” the Carrier IQ said in a statement.
They also said that their programs are “designed to help mobile network providers diagnose critical issues that lead to problems such as dropped calls and battery drain… While we look at many aspects of a device’s performance, we are counting and summarizing performance, not recording keystrokes or providing tracking tools. The metrics and tools we derive are not designed to deliver such information, nor do we have any intention of developing such tools.”
The company maintains that they do not log keystrokes or track smartphone users, and that they do not sell any personal information to third parties.
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Article source: http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1112433567/carrier-iq-hit-with-lawsuits-following-spyware-accusations/index.html
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