Trevor Eckhart, a 25 year old man from Connecticut discovered a mysterious piece of software by the name of 'IQRD' installed on his HTC Android smartphone. It wasn't seen in his running programs list in task manager, but it was always running, and virtually impossible to stop. Through investigation, Eckhart discovered that this humble little software was capable of much more than any other application on his phone. It could see what he was doing.
Carrier IQ has software installed on almost 150 million phones, software which has the capability of tracking your every activity - your keystrokes, your text messages, your calls and even your browsing history. The company didn't do themselves any favours by sending a cease and desist letter to Eckhart. After all, telling someone to shut up, albeit in a orderly and business-like manner isn't too different from telling the rest of the world that you have something very sinister to hide. But this ill-informed perception multiplied by the sensationalist media is quite contrary to reality, Carrier IQ have nothing to hide. And surely nothing sinister to hide.
The whole scandal has been in most part an enormous public relations disaster, with what is genuinely a small issue being blow exponentially out of proportion. The phrase 'your phone is tracking you' has an unnecessarily dire ring to it and unsurprisingly it's been a phrase that the media has overused countless times throughout the duration of this scandal. The truth is, even though your phone is capable of tracking your every move, is it really? And to be entirely pragmatic, why would the carrier have even the slightest concern on the content of your text message or browsing history?
Sure, Carrier IQ, along with the carriers may have stumbled into a moral grey area by not clearly informing consumers of the presence of the tracking software on phones. But the basic use case of Carrier IQ's software doesn't deem it as a necessity. Despite the fact that Carrier IQ can see everything you're doing, the software acts a lot like a drug sniffing dog. It sniffs into every nook and cranny but only barks when it finds drugs. Carrier IQ reads everything, but only records abnormal or undesired behaviour - like a dropped call, unloading webpage or a failed text message. The software discards everything else almost as soon as it comes in.
At that, Carrier IQ is really just a mandatory process, another gear in the whole working mechanics of the carriers and your phones. Your carrier contract doesn't inform you that your calls and texts operate by sending signals to satellites and that your phone operates by passing electronic currents through wires and complicated circuit-boards. Why then, would it be necessary to inform users that their phone occasionally picks up abnormal data in order to ultimately better their phone experience? It's just part of the process.
By the hard stencilled writing of the law, the company have potentially acted illegally, breaching federal wire-tapping law. But to what good is the law when it can't account for crucial contextual detail, and in this case Carrier IQ have engaged in unlawful activity but whilst benefiting everyone involved. What they're doing simply isn't a bad thing.
To give the company what they've been handed in the past week is unquestionably unfair. As the world shoots at the company for immoral and unethical behaviour, this destructive negativity itself is in breach of ethics. It's unethical to throw metaphorical faeces at an innocent company simply doing their job.
Nobody's reading your text messages, nobody's looking at your web history, nobody is stalking you. Carrier IQ is helping you, while the media attempts to earn the ad dollars by selling the lopsided hyperbole they're here to write.
It's time that people got a look at the broader picture of the Carrier IQ 'scandal', instead of spreading the word that Carrier IQ is 'tracking you', 'stalking you', 'watching you' and a bunch of other bull excrement that the media put into their mouths.
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