Exclusive interview on The Verge from Sean Hollister and Dieter Bohn with VP Andrew Coward about what Carrier IQ’s role is in logging your phone’s activity. Coward believes that in a perfect world, the activities that Carrier IQ performs on the devices would be opt-in:
I would say, as Carrier IQ, if we had direct relationships with consumers, if we were a normal application company, we’d have to build up trust and say “do you mind if we do A, do you mind if we do B, do you mind if we do C.” But in the service provider world, that question just hasn’t really come up… until recently. Since the telephone was invented, there’s just been this enormous trust between the consumer and operator. For instance, our software doesn’t see content, but within the network, you surely can.
There are many references back to days were phones just had “features” and not apps — so having software that isn’t sandboxed that just logs information isn’t a sensitive subject. Today in an apps/OS world, a back-end logger has access to 100x more information, and there is a “fuzzy” line on what is sensitive or not.
In general, the conversation ends with many more open questions that are up to the carriers to answer. For example, why aren’t these logs deleted on the phone instantly? What do the carriers really want with this information, other than what Carrier IQ thinks they want? Should this be an opt-in service when you sign on the dotted line?