

EFF: Some Facts About Carrier IQ - Tomek_
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/carrier-iq-architecture

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donall
Not meaning to be the nitpicking guy, but there's a typo in the title. It
should read "EFF", not "EEF".

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dreamdu5t
"Unfortunately, our current belief is that the layer-4 logging that has been
observed, which goes to Android system logs, is in fact being inadvertantly
transmitted to some third parties and otherwise made available to other
applications on the device.

This happens when crash reporting tools collect copies of the system logs for
debugging purposes. The recipients of such transmissions are unlikely to have
anticipated receiving keystrokes, text messages, URLs or location information
through such channels, but that can in fact happen on some of the phones to
which Carrier IQ has been ported.

What this means is that keystrokes, text message content and other very
sensitive information is in fact being transmitted from some phones on which
Carrier IQ is installed to third parties."

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TeMPOraL
How come we haven't noticed this before? That is, some of those logs were
probably sent at some point to somebody who didn't exactly expect this kind of
data. I'm surprised nobody found out sooner.

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nkassis
people rarely read error logs?

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Natsu
In the logs made public in one of the earlier HN stories, the messages and
such are a small part of the log. There was a ton of crap about the phone with
someone's text message buried in the middle.

Similarly, the keypress logs were in hex or something as I recall. All there
and usable by anyone who knew what it was, but maybe not that obvious if you
didn't know what the hell that part of the log meant.

In other words, if people were just scanning the logs for other stuff, rather
than reading each log carefully, they'd probably have ignored that stuff.

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napierzaza
Well, Richard Stallman was right. But I wonder if he or anyone ever thought
that it went so far. When they save "installed on every phone" does that mean
every phone in existence? In the USA?

~~~
Symmetry
No. Verizon doesn't use Carrier IQ at all, and as far as I can tell T-Mobile
only deploys it on BlackBerrys. If I had an Android device on AT&T or Sprint,
though, I'd want to install Cyanogenmod.

Here's a link to a piece of software that can detect CarrierIQ on your phone:
[https://market.android.com/details?id=org.projectvoodoo.simp...](https://market.android.com/details?id=org.projectvoodoo.simplecarrieriqdetector)

