The nation's privacy and technology community is buzzing about software embedded in millions of smartphones. There are new concerns that it's tracking nearly everything a user does. NBC's Pete Williams reports.
By Suzanne Choney
Three of the nation's four largest wireless carriers ? AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile ? say they use Carrier IQ's controversial key-logging software, say they do not use it to monitor subscribers' activities. The Carrier IQ program is an analytical tool, strictly to "improve wireless network and service performance," not to track users' personal data, said AT&T.
Sprint said in a statement that Carrier IQ software helps:
... analyze our network performance and identify where we should be improving service. We also use the data to understand device performance so we can figure out when issues are occurring. We collect enough information to understand the customer experience with devices on our network and how to address any connection problems, but we do not and cannot look at the contents of messages, photos, videos, etc., using this tool. The information collected is not sold and we don't provide a direct feed of this data to anyone outside of Sprint.
T-Mobile, contacted by msnbc.com, said late Thursday it uses Carrier IQ strictly as a "diagnostic tool to troubleshoot device and network performance with the goal of enhancing network reliability and our customers'? experience." The carrier "does not use this diagnostic tool to obtain the content of text, email or voice messages, or the specific destinations of a customers' Internet activity, nor is the tool used for marketing purposes."
Verizon Wireless told msnbc.com, it doesn't put Carrier IQ? "on our phones, nor do we use any Carrier IQ data." Asked whether it uses similar programs from other companies, a Verizon Wireless spokesperson said it does not.
Meanwhile, Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., chairman of the Senate's subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and Law, is asking Carrier IQ to clarify exactly what its software can and can't do.
One wireless industry representative, who asked to remain anonymous, said Carrier IQ software is "not an Orwellian plot to gather people's information. It's to help us see if someone is dropping calls, where there are dead spots; it's not to gather people's personal information or to see what you're doing or where you're going."
Still, if the software can do those things, as one researcher contends, there are concerns about whether Carrier IQ is violating federal wiretap laws.
?If Carrier IQ has gotten the handset manufactures to install secret software that records keystrokes intended for text messaging and the Internet and are sending some of that information back somewhere, this is very likely a federal wiretap," Paul Ohm, a former Justice Department prosecutor and law professor at the University of Colorado Law School, told Forbes. ?And that gives the people wiretapped the right to sue and provides for significant monetary damages.?
Carrier IQ
Carrier IQ is on more than 141 million cellphones, according to the company.
Meanwhile, Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, said Thursday it doesn't install Carrier IQ on its phones, and doesn't authorize wireless carriers to use the program.
That counters the finding of the security researcher, Trevor Eckhart of Connecticut, who said that Carrier IQ software is installed on many Android, BlackBerry and Nokia phones. His YouTube video of the software in action has stunned many as it shows Carrier IQ logging information, including text messages, as the information is tapped onto the phone keyboard. But RIM and Nokia said Carrier IQ is not used on their devices.
"RIM does not pre-install the Carrier IQ app on BlackBerry smartphones or authorize its carrier partners to install the Carrier IQ app before sales or distribution," RIM told Reuters. "RIM also did not develop or commission the development of the Carrier IQ application, and has no involvement in the testing, promotion or distribution of the app."
"CarrierIQ does not ship products for any Nokia devices," a company spokesman told Reuters.
Eckhart says Carrier IQ's software, designed to monitor the performance of a cell phone on a network, is a "rootkit," spying on unsuspecting users. Carrier IQ says it is not.
"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 company said in a recent statement. We've contacted Carrier IQ for more information.
A spokeswoman for the company said it has been inundated with "thousands of incoming requests," and asked us to look at a previous "media statement," which says, in part, what Carrier IQ's software does and does not do:
-? Does not record your keystrokes.
-? Does not provide tracking tools.
-? Does not inspect or report on the content of your communications, such as the content of emails and SMSs.
-? Does not provide real-time data reporting to any customer.
-? Finally, we do not sell Carrier IQ data to third parties.
The iPhone, too, may have the software on it, albeit in a more benign way (we've asked Apple for comment; none yet, and will update if we hear back). According to The Verge, Grant Paul, aka "Chpwn,"?a "well-known" iPhone hacker, said that Carrier IQ's software on the iPhone:
... may only be active when the iPhone is in diagnostic mode. In a blog post, chpwn confirms that, based on his initial testing, Apple has added some form of Carrier IQ software to all versions of iOS, including iOS 5. However, the good news is that it does not appear to actually send any information so long as a setting called DiagnosticsAllowed is set to off, which is the default. Finally, the local logs on iOS seem to store much less information than what has been seen on Android, limited to some call activity and location (if enabled), but not any text from the web browser, SMS, or anywhere else.
We'll continue to follow the issue. For those "tinfoil hat people," as Gizmodo called them, they're not alone. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, speaking at a panel discussion, said Thursday:
"Who here has an iPhone? Who here has a BlackBerry? Who here uses Gmail? Well, you're all screwed. The reality is, intelligence contractors are selling right now to countries across the world mass surveillance systems for all those products." Perhaps this is merely a first glimpse of what's to come.
Update: No word from Apple, although Cult of Mac had this statement from Cupertino: "We stopped supporting CarrierIQ with iOS 5 in most of our products and will remove it completely in a future software update. With any diagnostic data sent to Apple, customers must actively opt-in to share this information, and if they do, the data is sent in an anonymous and encrypted form and does not include any personal information. We never recorded keystrokes, messages or any other personal information for diagnostic data and have no plans to ever do so."
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