Last week we learned that a California-based IT company called Carrier IQ had developed tracking software found secretly embedded on more than 140 smartphones. Concerned about Americans’ privacy, Chris wrote to the president of Carrier IQ demanding answers. The News Journal published an editorial today supporting Chris’ push to protect users’ privacy.
Early this fall, a television series premiered with the premise that our government is recording every phone call, reading every email and watching every move through a massive network of cameras trained on streets, parking garages and shopping malls.
In the series, “Person of Interest,” the government seeks only terrorists and throws away the information on the innocent. While it’s enough to keep conspiracy theorists up at night, the TV series is a delightful fiction.
Just a few years ago, a company called Carrier IQ secretly installed a monitoring code on 150 million mobile phones. This hidden code logged what websites the users visited, kept track of phone calls and text messages, including where and to whom they were sent. Carrier IQ downloaded the information every day and distributed it to various clients. It has, the company admits, a “treasure trove” of information on the phone users. A spokesman added, under a reporter’s questioning, that his company probably could read the text messages and emails as well.
This is real. It is not fiction. And it is anything but delightful.
And if conspiracy theorists aren’t sitting up and howling, then something is terribly wrong in the country.
Luckily several U.S. Senators, including Chris Coons of Delaware, have started asking some very tough questions. Among them: Who has access to the data? Is this really wiretapping?
Sen. Coons, in a letter to the company’s president, said, “A latent capacity to log keystrokes or track location may provide a backdoor that an individual or organization could exploit.”
Some experts believe the coding could open up the phones to hacking or sabotage.
Carrier IQ installed the code with the acquiescence of the phone manufacturers. It was designed to monitor possible software malfunctions and other usage data that would help the phone companies anticipate and fix problems.
But the phone users had no idea they were being tracked and logged. In addition, the data collected by Carrier IQ goes far beyond the kind of information the phone companies have a right, or reason, to know.
Again, Sen. Coons: “If your company never intended to collect or make use of this information, I wonder why your company would have included the capacity to log it.”
This is developing into a major scandal and, from what is known now, Americans should be outraged. We have been losing our privacy to the data miners bit by bit.
This advanced technology is here to stay. It serves the interests of commerce and individual interests.
We must, however, make sure that the laws be obeyed.
Read the editorial in the News Journal.
Click here to learn more about Chris’ work on the Senate Judiciary Committee.