Sprint Orders All OEMs To Strip Carrier IQ From Their Phones 156
An anonymous reader writes with a report that Sprint, in an attempt to extricate itself from the Carrier IQ drama, has "ordered that all of their hardware partners remove the Carrier IQ software from Sprint devices as soon as possible." Sprint confirmed that they've disabled the use of Carrier IQ on their end, saying, "diagnostic information and data is no longer being collected." The software is currently installed on roughly 26 million Sprint phones, though the company has only been collecting data from 1.3 million of them.
Re:Sounds cool (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, unless something's changed, Verizon never had CarrierIQ to begin with. If you're concerned about it, I think "never did it" trumps "stopped doing it when they got caught".
Re:Sprint (Score:2, Informative)
You get what you pay for.
Sprint - 2847GB/mo (limited by 4G connection speed/availability)
Verizon - 5GB/mo + overage charges
I'll take service over "customer care" any day.
Re:Sounds cool (Score:2, Informative)
Oh yeah, I'm totally sure Verizon made sure OEMs kept CarrierIQ off all their phones and, where that wasn't possible, deleted all such information as it arrived, since they would never use data that could be sold at a tremendous profit or alert them to network problems.
*jerk-off gesture*
Uh... you're aware that CarrierIQ was a software package SOLD TO THE CARRIER, NOT THE HANDSET MANUFACTURER, right?
So. Since Verizon never paid CarrierIQ for their data collections software, never ran their data collection servers... obviously they're just going to pirate the client software on their phones for shits and giggles, right?
Looks like AT&T too (Score:4, Informative)
While Sprint has been the largest user of CarrierIQ, with the most invasive CIQ installations in devices, AT&T was starting to put it on their phones too. For example, the Samsung Infuse 4G Gingerbread leaks from September to November carried a CIQ installation that was quite invasive. All evidence of CIQ is gone from the latest UCKL2 leak.
Similarly, while the original UCKH7 build for the Galaxy S II did not have CIQ, all leaks from October and November had it start to appear - but it was removed before the official UCKK6 update that just started getting rolled out to users earlier this week.
Carrier IQ (the company) = smoking crater. Their largest user is dropping them like a hot potato, and their fastest growth market (AT&T devices) is also ditching them.
Canadians are still screwed - Rogers seems silent in terms of CIQ. They actually had the balls to claim they don't use it, even though it was clearly there in the UXKG3 firmware release for the Samsung Infuse in that country.