December 05, 2011, 2:21 PM — AT&T and Sprint have admitted secretly installing a spyware app called Carrier IQ on their smartphones, while RIM and Nokia continue to deny it, despite statements from researcher Trevor Eckart that he had found the rootkit on both Blackberry and Nokia phones.
It's a refreshing bit of honesty – though only by contrast with the other players – from major players, all of whom got caught red-handed running very capable spyware on the phones of their customers without mentioning that they'd done it.
Eckhart posted a video showing Carrier IQ recording all the keystrokes he made on the handset.
Carrier IQ, the company that makes the "mobile-service intelligence solution" said the software doesn't record keystrokes track users, inspect content on a phone or give real-time data on user activities to the carriers.
The company issued a statement Dec. 1 "vigorously" disagreeing with charges it had violated wiretap laws (PDF) by secretly recording user activities. the software collects performance data on phones, not the content of what users do. Every carrier sets up the monitoring in a different way, so it Carrier IQ can't give a firm list of all the information each collects.
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