CarrierIQ Hires Former Verizon Counsel As Chief Privacy Officer 45
Trailrunner7 writes, quoting Threat Post: "Carrier IQ, a startup heavily bruised last fall by harsh criticism of its handset diagnostic software, today announced it's hired a high-profile lawyer as its Chief Privacy Officer. Magnolia Mansourkia Mobley, a CIPP and former Verizon executive, will be tasked with quickly broadening the company's focus on consumer privacy. She also was named the company's General Counsel. The company became the flashpoint in a heated controversy after initial reports its analytics software, embedded in some 150 mobile phones, was capable of gathering a great deal of personal data without the customer's consent."
Re:Google Analytics (Score:3, Informative)
I hope that people and privacy advocates would look at Google Analytics too. It is basically the same CarrierIQ is, only made for webpages. And Google has been abusing it for almost 10 years already.
No it isn't...it isn't even close to the same thing. CarrierIQ was capturing keystrokes, even though they said otherwise. CarrierIQ was something you could not block or neuter all all, unlike Google Analytics. A subset of what CarrierIQ does is slightly similar to what Google Analytics does, if instead of allowing the cellular carrier to diagnose mobile device issues you think in terms of a website owner looking at the traffic patterns within their own site, but that's not the subset that anyone cares about. And Google Analytics is NOT a decade old. This function used to be served by companies like Websense and other early SAAS providers that did analytics on 'stickiness' and figuring out which pages users were most likely to be at when they left a site. The analytics are provided for the site owner, so that they can look at how traffic patterns demonstrate the effectiveness of their site. Furthermore, the way Google does it supports using an "A/B" approach to site improvement (pick up this month's copy of Wired magazine to learn more about that), whereby you give random users slightly different versions of the same site and compare the results to see which is more effective...and that is HUGELY helpful.
Nor is Google Analytics 'abuse'. How do we know this? Because privacy advocates HAVE been looking at it.
I know, I know...it's suprising to find out that privacy organizations have been looking at a small boutique shop like Google; it's easy to think you were ahead of the curve with such a far-reaching idea as "hey, let's look at Google's handling of privacy matters!" Guess you just got to the idea a few minutes behind the very most bleeding-edge, eh? :)
Learn what something is before you get on a soapbox about how awful it is or how it's used. Here you go, here's a link [google.com]. It was really hard to find, too.