Congratulations! Your new Android smartphone may come with a special feature called the Carrier IQ Insight Experience Manager. According to its homepage, it allows you to “Boost Revenues with Improved Mobile Customer Experience!” This should allow you to — wait, what?
It seems that this isn’t something you get to use. Rather, it’s something your wireless carrier or smartphone manufacturer may have put onto your Android smartphone. Because of it, they might be able to “Identify exactly how (you) interact with services” and “See which content (you) consume, even offline.”
What the heck does that mean? And why are there all these sample charts on the CIQ homepage, showing how long people use different kinds of apps?
Eye see you
In a nutshell, this CIQ stuff is spyware that gets preloaded onto your smartphone by the carrier or manufacturer, as far back as when the Samsung Moment came out. Worse, it may have been installed on your Sprint EVO 3D or T-Mobile Sensation 4G in the last software update, and they’re probably not the only smartphones affected. A site called Droid Gamers has the details, including some really disturbing stuff about exactly what this thing can monitor.
Smartphone manufacturer HTC has taken the lead in being up-front about how it uses CIQ. According to the statement HTC made to the XDA-Developers forum, it only uses CIQ’s data collection for its “Tell HTC Customer Service App,” which lets you report errors you’re having. Your data is encrypted and can’t be used to identify you, and it only gets sent at all if you opt in to the program.
Something doesn’t add up
HTC’s statement may be believable. The company has started to become extremely developer-friendly lately, even putting things up for download like free tools to “jailbreak” your HTC smartphone. Not everyone’s into this kind of thing, but the ones who are are the kind of people who notice this spyware, and HTC’s trying really hard to get on their good side. So far, it’s been succeeding.
But what about everyone else who uses CIQ? CIQ’s website, after all, isn’t advertising its spyware as a secure way to gather crash logs and troubleshooting data. It’s advertising it as a way to find out what your customers do with their smartphones. And as XDA-Developers member k0nane reports, the full list of stuff CIQ can keep track of is mind-boggling … plus it eats up your battery life.
Is CIQ a good idea, bad idea, or somewhere in between? Whatever it is, it’s one more reason to read the fine print … and one more example of the kind of stuff that fine print lets companies get away with.
Article source: http://news.yahoo.com/sprint-others-spy-android-smartphones-193400910.html
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