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Comment by DevX101 | Hacker News Reader

There are a handful of comments here giving CarrierIQ the benefit of the doubt, because the video did not show CarrierIQ sending the logged data over the network.

If you're still inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, just read the CarrierIQ website. Their ENTIRE BUSINESS MODEL is based on collecting data about mobile phone users!! Here's a choice excerptI found on their website after browsing their site for 30 seconds[1]:

Carrier IQ's Mobile Service Intelligence Platform (MSIP)...receives raw data (known as Metrics) from phones and converts them into reliable, repeatable Measures which feed into analytic applications.

Or you can read this comment from a discussion last week where a CarrierIQ recruiter told an HN member that they collect 10s of gigabytes of data PER DAY.[2]

These guys are indeed collecting RAW DATA from actions on your phone. There are tremendous opportunities for abuse here, should CarrierIQ decide to do so. CarrierIQ in blatant violation of privacy norms and could do enormous damage to national security of many countries, conduct corporate espionage, or simply violate the citizens' expectation of privacy when using their phone.

This is dangerous and should be stopped immediately.

1. http://www.carrieriq.com/overview/mobileservice/index.htm 2. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3264264

View on HN

They say they are installed on > 148.3M phones. If we imagine that they are gathering 10GB per day then that's about 76 bytes per phone, if it's 90GB (the upper limit before the recruiter would have been shouting about terabytes) then it's 680 bytes. It's more likely to be in the middle (because otherwise the recruiter would have rounded up) so you are talking 100s of bytes per phone per day. I don't think it's realistic that they are sending all my URLs, all my keystrokes etc. in a few hundred bytes.

I don't think it's realistic that they are sending all my URLs, all my keystrokes etc. in a few hundred bytes.

I tend to agree with you, but at the same time wonder how they're aggregating the data; they could store each day's raw data in however many GB, then crunch it down later.

The only other potential issue that jumps out at me is bandwidth; I'd find it strange if the data isn't being compressed, but if it is, you could cram quite a lot of useful information into those few hundred bytes ;)

Whether they are sending a full log report of my actions TODAY is beside the main point.

I do however know two things. 1) That their local software processes almost every key stroke made. 2) And that they do send at least some portion of this data back to their servers.

At this point it would be trivial for them to send my private information TOMORROW if they decided to do so. I don't know that they don't have a subroutine to begin sending all of my SMS back to their servers if they decide to so for profit or under government coercion.

If they have no plans of using my Google searches, they shouldn't process it in the first place.

This is exactly right. It is the presence of a keylogger, which (at the very least) is echoing keystrokes, that is the problem. Whether they 'send' everything or only parts of it, or whether the data is anonymized, aggregated etc is a whole other discussion.

This is, of course, an attitude that is going to "deftly" shoot down any new fact or analysis brought into the discussion.

Your starting point was that they were collecting† data that could jeopardize national security††. You clearly based that argument on the idea that their own recruiter mentioned "10s of gigabytes a day".

Now, in true message board geek fashion, you're going to steadily move the goalposts. What? They're not collecting messages? Well then they're processing messages! They shouldn't be doing that either!

The problem with this tactic --- make a spectacularly unsupported assertion and then back off it in a series of non-concession-concessions --- is that you cease to be credible. Is this what you really think? Or will you re-harden your position if e.g. it becomes clear that they're not even seeing the keycodes of the keypresses, but rather using an API that could conceivably allow them to get them.

† Your word.

†† Ibid.

Here's a thread full of you vehemently defending/rationalizing police state -like behaviour: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2802917

Now you're defending/rationalizing whatever disgusting bullshit Carrier IQ is up to.

What's wrong with you?

Just like we didn't have absolute proof that Aaron's indictment was politically motivated, we can't be absolutely sure that Carrier IQ is a company full of shit and devoid of morals.

But it's blindingly obvious that both are very, very likely.

In case you're just blissfully unaware of how full of shit the world actually is, here's a report on your justice system fraudulently, systematically signing away people's homes: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/matt-taibbi-courts...

Government contracts can have that effect.

I wouldn't know. But the idea that you can't even fathom how someone might have a different point of view from you and not be bought off by the government is telling.

I actually concur with your arguments. But I guess you're hell bent on making an ass of you and me.

He's based his argument on the recruiter's statement, which is a poor choice. On the other hand, other material from the company supports, in fact, a much larger number.

I don't think there's any goalpost moving here at all: Hundreds of millions of keyloggers -- rootkits, really, as the article states -- are installed and unremovable. Whether they are being abused or not at the moment is irrelevant; it should be outrageous and unacceptable that such a datastream is going through a third-party without any kind of transparency, acceptance, or even tacit acknowledgement.

Likewise, your rhetorical refutation here (very thorough, in the abstract) would be a lot more damning if there wasn't, you know, video evidence of this rootkit collecting exactly this data and sending it back.

Its a few hundred bytes on average, that doesn't mean every phone reports every day nor does it take into account the number of phones with this installed whom rarely use the device. This probably lives on both my parents handsets and they make 4-5 calls and 1-2 text messages a week between them. I think that type of minimal usage is actually quite wide-spread which easily offsets higher usage users, and with presumably higher outbound data to CarrierIQ.

An average across 145M users crossing various demographics and phones types is not a good metric to use to determine the possible danger of the data being sent.

...if it's 90GB (the upper limit before the recruiter would have been shouting about terabytes)...

A terabyte is 1000GB. Why would they be shouting about terabytes if it were anything over .09 terabytes?

Because that's how recruiter math works. They round to the nearest buzz word.

Don't you think it's a pretty shaky argument? They're not transferring much data on your phone because of "recruiter math"?

And isn't it likely that some phones are set to transfer more data than others?

It's likely that of the reported install base, only a small percentage of devices are actually in active use today.

But simple zip on raw text is what? 3 or 4 to 1? Particularly when you're talking about urls. So now you're talking about at least a couple kbytes of raw data.

So logging all of everyone's texts is probably still out.

But easily logging their browsing patterns. Probably app installation and use. And certainly they retain the capability to log texts containing keywords without going too far outside that aggregate range of data. Or doing targeted logging of all of selected individuals usage.

I'd just like to point out that what I hypothesized above have been revealed to be actual features of the CarrierIQ software. So I'm not sure what the downvote is for, but it's not inaccuracy or undue cynicism.

Probably not all phones sends the data every day, they can be scheduled monthly or they request data from phones only if there is a network problem.

For the amount many people who heavily use their phones, I think the numbers are sound. 1% of the users probably consume 99% of the resources. You being that in top 1%.

If they're only saving, say, online searches and the resulting ip address from each visit, that might be doable, and it seems like the best way to get info passively, and in small sizes.

Where did you get 10GB per day from? They boasted about PETABYTES of data they've collected.

"Carrier IQ, which in the second quarter of 2011 passed the petabyte milestone in processed analytics data"

-- http://www.carrieriq.com/company/PR.LarryLenhartCEO.pdf

Great point. The 10s of GB was anecdotal data from a CarrierIQ recruiter.

If we go by the official letter you've posted and assume conservatively CarrierIQ has only 1 Petabyte of data, and that they've been collecting since 2006 (when they received their Series A), they've been collecting 456 GBs of data per day. Its probably more than that today since the data collection rate has surely accelerated over time.

That's an order of magnitude beyond 10s of GB per day.

Well realistically they would not have been collecting 456GB per day from day 1. They would have grown from almost nothing, which means that today they're probably collecting around a terabyte per day. That's two orders of magnitude, 7KB per user per day - and could definitely include all keystrokes of all users.

A smart drug dealer never brings the drug home. He uses drop off locations. In this case, your phone maybe the drop off location.

What percentage of all the SMS messages send by Sprint Android phones in a day do you think 10 gigabytes is? Start here: the US generates about 2 trillion SMS messages in a year across all phones.

There are multiple YC startups that could write the (bad) marketing sentence "we receive raw data (known as metrics) from X and convert them into reliable, repeatable Measures which feed into analytic applications". Personally, I'm inclined to think that when someone writes "we receive raw metrics", they mean "they receive raw metrics". You seem to premise your entire comment on the idea that "raw metrics" means "tremendous opportunities for abuse, damage to national security, corporate espionage".

Those two points --- 10 gigabytes, and "raw metrics" --- seem literally to be the entire basis of your (currently top ranked) comment.

I wish I could be more strident in disagreeing with you (because your tone makes me want to be), but I have to admit that I have no clue what this company is taking off Sprint phones. I'm inclined to believe that nobody could be dumb enough to take the contents of SMS messages from phones --- Sprint doesn't want that data --- but who knows?

I wrote a similarly negative comment yesterday when this story hit HN the first time. Then I read downthread and found John Graham-Cumming thoughtfully picking apart the story. I read his comment, re-read mine, and deleted mine. 'jgc's comments on this story are interesting; ours are less so; his is buried under yours now. Perhaps you could follow my lead.

At 160 bytes per text and 2T texts per year, there are 800 gigabytes of texts per day. Thus Carrier IQ is monitoring the equivalent of 1% of all texts across all phones. That is still quite significant.

The point isn't how many texts they're getting --- one would be too many. The point is "10 gigabytes per day of metrics" doesn't itself imply that they're getting message contents.

I sincerely doubt that CarrierIQ, or the phone carriers, even care about our text messages. That said, there are other people who do

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/leaked_911_tex...

Even so, I wouldn't put it past them to do keyword mining for mobile ads. That just seems like such an obvious potential use.

If Sprint wanted to do that, it doesn't need agent software to get the messages.

This is an important point that I think some people are forgetting. I use Verizon. They already have access to all of my text messages. I send my text messages to Verizon, who then forwards them on to the person I'm talking to. Just as Google first gets my email.

It is unfortunately a point that the contradicts the thread narrative that casts a hapless, poorly-marketed analytics company as Big Brother incarnate, so nobody's going to pay attention to it.

They put backdoors on basically every phone in secret, threatened the guy who outed them with a lawsuit and are perfectly capable of snooping on everything, whether they do so or not.

What do you know about them that makes you trust them?

Nothing. There's just a likely innocent explanation for all three of those things:

1. CarrierIQ is a "secret" in the same sense as the network management software that Sprint uses that can also see all your SMS messages is a "secret": (a) nobody at Sprint thinks its relevant to you, and (b) nobody at Sprint thinks its any of your business. Which, if you take a breath, strictly speaking about the performance metrics they're collecting, it isn't your business.

2. CarrierIQ was dumb about threatening this guy like lots of other companies have been identically dumb. Companies have threatened to sue me. I remain cordial with the owners of some of those companies. Welcome to security research; we don't have jackets, but we sure get a lot of press.

Incidentally, put yourself in CarrierIQ's position and assume that this particular researcher is full of shit, meaning, no, CarrierIQ is not snooping on people's keystrokes. What would you do? There's a guy out there claiming that their performance agent is a "rootkit". They got pissed. Surprised?

3. Any piece of systems software the carrier agrees to stick on the phone is capable of snooping. Sprint itself could just backdoor their Android distro.

In their shoes, I would have contacted the researcher and explained myself. While unsurprising, that move was unwise, and I would imagine that you agree on that point at least.

I think someone once said that sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. Whether they're dumb or malicious, I'm just glad their crap isn't on my phone.

Even they seem to agree with it; rather than just shutting up about their C&D, they actually issued a formal apology to Trevor. That's an uncommon move.

I don't know whether some other shoe is about to drop; for instance, someone could actually show that they're transmitting real keycodes and not just metrics data. But in the absence of that shoe dropping, especially given how many people have jumped to a conclusion about CarrierIQ, I'm inclined to believe that what they do is actually benign. If you want to get upset at someone, get upset at the carriers themselves. When you do, remember, they're already recording all your messages without CarrierIQ.

Ok, now see, I missed that part about the apology somehow; I only knew that they dropped the lawsuit when lawyers stepped in. While there's no way I'd allow this crap on my phone, it does get them a little credit.

"The point isn't how many texts they're getting ... "

You, earlier:

"What percentage of all the SMS messages ... do you think 10 gigabytes is?"

Stop moving the goalposts and maybe we'll get somewhere.

You are militantly missing my point. There is no evidence that they are seeing message contents. All we are going on in this thread is the supposition that because they're getting "10 gigabytes a day", it must be message contents.

They themselves use the phrase "raw data" to describe what they collect (as "metrics"). Metrics are not comprised of raw data, but of measurements, so unless they're being hinky with word choice, a plain reading of their own materials would suggest that they do indeed receive user content.

They've said repeatedly that they do not collect that data. This is a common attitude on HN threads: the idea that the only facts for us to discuss are the ones in the article itself or in other comments on the thread. There are more facts just a Google search away for you.

Their own words are not dispositive; I'm not suggesting that they are. But here you're trying to interpret their words in a way that contradicts their own direct statement. Your interpretation is possibly accurate, but implausible.

Fair enough. Given what you've read, where do you think the line is between "user content" and the data they received?

An update: http://daringfireball.net/2011/12/rootkit_eh

I read this and don't see how it clears anything up.

My best guess (I know just as little about CarrierIQ as everyone else on this thread) is that CarrierIQ is trying to collect very innocuous information (performance statistics and event information to correlate them to), but is doing a slapdash job of generating that information --- for instance, by logging raw details to the Android filesystem.

I wouldn't want it on my phone either, but that doesn't make them Big Brother --- or, obviously, a "rootkit".

that the companies are all playing hot potato still, days later, tells me there's more to come out about this.

But they are monitoring on the client side, correct?

Who is to say the carriers are not processing on the upstream? We certainly know that Carnivore was designed to do just this.

Let's just say; there is NO privacy on ANY digital communications. Period.

If you think otherwise, it is likely just being naive.

We know that the US and China have been in an extended cyber war fro more that 10 years now.

To say that is to give up trying

You're thinking quantitative when you should be thinking qualitative. The worrisome thing is that, as the screenshots show, they seem have access to location-based information.

http://www.carrieriq.com/overview/IQInsightServiceAnalyzer/i...

I wouldn't care if they were logging non-identifying info, such as the amount of time my phone display is on to analyze battery performance, for instance, or perhaps even the general settings I have on my phone to help HTC deliver more desirable "factory settings." Any of this could add up to that 1% you mention.

Speaking personally though I use a 5 or 6-year-old Blackberry model with no data plan and will happily continue to do so.

160 bytes per text seems like a very generous estimate. Casual observation would suggest the average is less than half that. I just got a text that seemed pretty long to me, so I went back and measured it. It was 90 bytes (104 characters * 7 bits per character / 8 bits per byte).

Nobody had computed the percentage:

Using 2e12 SMS messages/year, 160 characters/message, and 1 byte/character:

(2e12 * 160) / (365 * (2^30)) = 816.501983 GiB/day

So 10GiB/day is about 1.2% of daily SMS traffic.

EDIT: Too slow.

There software is not on all phones so the total number of SMS messages is irrelevant. Assuming the average text message are 80 charters and they can be compressed 75% then 10GB could be 500 million messages a day and 180billion / year which would be 10% of the total messages in a year. Or with enough meta data 10GB could represent a tiny fraction of that. So, IMO the real question is what information they actually collect not how much data they are storing.

Myself and almost every other mobile phone user have the reasonable expectation that third parties should not have the ABILITY to read or modify my private and personal information unless I explicitly give you permission to do so.

This fundamental principle is embedded in all the software I use. I consider any software that doesn't adhere to this principle malware. When my PC crashes, Microsoft asks me if I want to share information with them about what led to the crash. I usually say no, but I appreciate them asking. When I use gmail, I do so with the understanding that Google has full access to the contents of my email. They promise me that they won't do any funny stuff and I accept the conditions of this contract in exchange for free email.

I never entered into such an agreement with CarrierIQ. I've never even heard of CarrierIQ until this week. Yet despite this, they are logging everything I type into my phone, and sending some portion of the information that they log.

If I offered you $100 to install a program I wrote that logged every keystroke on your computer and sent some portion of this information to my own server over TCP, without giving you a privacy policy, you know very well you'd never take me up on this offer. So why is it ok with CarrierIQ?

The focus on how much information is in 10GB is beside the point. The point is that CarrierIQ has been demonstrated to have the ability to read and send everything you type into your phone. At this point we're just hoping they're the good guys and won't do anything overtly evil. But what's to stop them from calling the following function on your phone?

if username == 'tptack': sendStoredData()

All this comment does is moralize. It adds no new information and provides no useful analysis. The only analysis you've provided to date appears flawed; for instance, it asserts that "10 gigabytes a day" of "raw metrics" implies "message contents".

As 'potatolicious seems fond of saying, "that's not even wrong".

Everyone agrees with you already.

I always forget, is it light or heat that's the one you don't want? You're adding more of the bad one, and none of the good one.

Apart from rebutting your analysis earlier, I'm under no illusion that my comment is helping clear up this ${INSERT_NERD_FREAKOUT_HERE} either, but I'm at least happy to speak up and raise the meta point that we shouldn't be rewarding comments like yours. Also, for obvious reasons, I'm past giving a shit about comment karma, so I can just say what I think.

A ${NERD_FREAKOUT} is what led to the enormous backlash against SOPA which very well may play an instrumental part in defeating the bill.

Principles matter, meta discussions like these matter. The technology we work on don't operate in a social vacuum.

No amount of principle excuses lazy, broken analysis.

Do you have a dog in this particular fight?

Yes. HN is becoming stupider by the day, and I like HN.

Well, in the interest of keeping the signal/noise ratio high, here's my view on things.

When someone uses a mobile phone, they generally have the assumption that, unless they consent to it, third parties do not have access to their data (the government being a different story I won't go into). When I use GMail, I consent to Google reading my email via automated algorithms, and targeting ads at me through that. If I have anything important, I use email that I host myself or, if it's really top-secret, an anonymous throwaway account through Tor.

However, from what this video demonstrates, CarrierIQ is violating the basic principle of this by capturing and potentially logging your personal data without your knowledge or consent. Furthermore, it's violating the assumption that most people have that their passwords and such are not captured by applications other than the ones that they are entered into.

Now, we don't know for sure whether all this information is sent off to their servers and logged or not. However, in my personal opinion, the fact that this information is CAPTURED AT ALL is a serious problem, when combined with the fact that you are not informed of this!

Are you a Carrier IQ shill or something?

He can't be.

He's one of the people who has been on HN forever. He's often a bit contrarian, but I don't doubt that he believes what he says, even when I strongly disagree with it. And if you scroll up, you'll see that I've already made clear my disagreements on this one.

@DevX101 - don't let the grumpy guy get you down. Your comments are spot on.

How do you feel about the supposed MITM "feature" of CarrierIQ's product?

I think that the facts matter.

I think that there are zero people on HN that think CarrierIQ is a good idea.

So if all we're doing here is condemning CarrierIQ, let's just replace this whole thread with "CARRIERIQ BAD", followed by a bulleted list of bad things, vote it up to 1000, and then get back to talking about building things.

Or how about if you don't think that this thread is contributing anything to what you think HN should be, you stop yelling at everyone posting in it and go back to "building things"?

We get it, you don't like this thread. You don't need to respond to every comment with a pedantic "fuck you, shut up, and get off my lawn, I have a billion comment karma because people upvote snark so now I'm going to act like a dick " comment of your own.

No. Tried that. Now trying the other way. These threads are dragging HN down, and I've decided to be noisier about it.

My feeling is that the same name recognition influence that gets most of my comments modded up 100-200% more than they're actually worth is going to get my -4 comments read even though they're light grey. We'll see!

> So if all we're doing here is condemning CarrierIQ

I asked someone who is quite good with crypto a question about a possible MITM attack on 141 million phones. I didn't condemn CarrierIQ, I avoided dramatic language, I even added qualifiers to avoid stating something as fact if it wasn't yet confirmed.

Sorry. You're right. I let the ultra dumbness of this whole thread bring me down a bit.

Doing an SSL MITM from agent software installed by the carrier on a phone seems pretty silly, since the carrier is in a position to see anything you're typing into your phone anyways (in the sense that it controls the OS).

I'm not sure I buy any analysis that suggests CarrierIQ is really "MITM'ing" SSL --- though that's trivial for a software agent to do --- because the same people saying that are also saying that it's obvious that CarrierIQ is capturing and remote-logging message contents.

real question here: Should it be obvious that the carrier controls the OS? Second question: is that acceptable? I mean, that assumption underpins your dismissal of an MITM as "pretty silly", which also seems totally correct.

I'm just curious if that's the way phones will be forever: with the OS controlled by the carrier and with no right to tinker/hack/modify the device you buy & pay huge monthly fees to use.

I very much wish it wasn't the case that carriers had influence over phone OS's.

They are collecting data, but I'm pretty sure it's not keystroke data - that kind of volume would be 10s of TB per day, not GB.

From your link to the recruiter:

Each handset collects and reports 100's of metrics of device and user behavior in real time.

That's data like phone location, applications used, etc. Very bad yes, keylogger reporting your password, no.

Did you read any of the articles or watch the video?

The guy shows `adb logcat` running and showing CarrierIQ logging keystrokes with their ASCII codes.

(edit: I make no claims about the transmission of data. I merely took "collection" and assumed that if the app was recording (even if not persistently) keystrokes on my phone that it counted as collection. Further, the fact that it can is enough to piss me off, especially since it seems like makers of this type of software have piss-poor track records for their app security)

Logging to logcat does not mean it's sending those keystrokes anywhere on the internet. Logcat is the local system log and doesn't necessarily get sent anywhere but to a ring buffer on the device.

Logging is not the same as sending over the network.

What if the program just collects the aggregate metrics, sends them and then deletes the actual keystrokes?

Not saying it doesn't send keystrokes, but the video is definitely not proof of that and it bears further investigation, not knee jerk reactions.

It's still pretty dangerous even if it doesn't send keystrokes.

No one is disputing that. But it's wrong to claim that there is clear evidence that keystrokes are being sent just because they're being logged.

There is a video camera in your bathroom secretly recording you. If the perpetrator never stops by to pick up the tape, is a crime committed?

If someone implies that there is proof that the perpetrator picked up the tape when there is no such evidence, are they right?

How did the perpetrator plant such a device in the first place? Did he have permission? If not, perhaps a different crime was committed.

To use a situation analogous to the situation with CarrierIQ, he did not have permission and you never even knew he was there or that the camera was there. However, the camera is digital, it is connected to your power outlet with a battery-backed UPS, and it has an active wireless modem attached to it.

Maybe he did send data, maybe he didn't. But he's also sent you a CnD notice and threatening to sue you if you tell anyone.

I am a bit lost at all the down votes but he was recording data that breaches privacy acts. If he did send such data without permission it is a rootkit and can be unlawful (data protection act, uk). Because everyone has collectively found out about this at the same time a CnD would not work.

By that logic we should all be very angry at our TTY drivers.

I'm not even sure what I should say to explain the difference here. It should be obvious...

You're implying the difference is intent. I'm saying, their intent isn't known. Their own statement is that they don't want the raw characters, just the stats.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of pieces of code strewn throughout your system that get access to similar bits of sensitive data. For instance, every BSD system has a BPF device and driver that exists solely to tap your network traffic. Luckily, nobody sells a BPF-for-Android product.

I'm not saying that this is a clinching argument. I'm simply making a point that is germane to the discussion. Distilled, it is: "just because a piece of systems code deals with your private information does not make a violation of your privacy; sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't".

There is a hell of a lot more wrong with your analogy than a mere "difference in intent".

I'm interested in why you think that. I wrote the comment in good faith. I'm asking you to clarify also in good faith.

Having reviewed your other comments in this discussion, I must say that I do not see the point in continuing this.

Yeah, but key logging? What could you possibly do with that data?

Besides, the BPF driver in every BSD system is probably open-source and could be reviewed for intent if in doubt. It's not easy, not everybody can do it, but it is possible.

However, you cannot do that for CarrierIQ. Even if such logs aren't getting sent, you don't know that they haven't installed some kind of mechanism to trigger such an upload on demand.

It's almost 2012 and "open source" doesn't matter that much anymore when it comes to stuff like this: there's enough incentive and basic competence now that someone's going to reverse engineer CarrierIQ, if only to get themselves some press.

What useful metric would keystrokes be part of? "Users tend to press the T key a lot..."

they can keep track of everything that you type, credit card info, wifi passwords, other passwords, sexting... so i guess nothing important, eh?

I would love it if somebody noticed that I hit the "return, backspace, space" combo over and over and made the return key slightly smaller.

Right, the argument is logged keystrokes never leave your phone because that amount of data from each Android/Blackberry phone would be a lot more thn 10 GB a day. I agree though, why are they logging it at all if the app isn't sending it to them? Very suspicious.

You, uh... you can enter 10 GB of text on your phone per day? I think maybe if you recorded all of the touch events, you'd end up with many megabytes worth, but I doubt the average user will enter more than a few kilobytes worth of text in a day.

That's a figure for all phones, not each phone. Read EwanToo's comment towards the top.

Text can be significantly compressed.

Yes I know. Unless the app sorts out valuable information from noise (passwords, account numbers, etc), I think this conspiracy theory is invalid.

I agree with you they will very easily record all the touch events. If you were typing 10 characters per second (which already seems like quite a lot) after 24h you will not even have a megabyte of information. Just over a megabyte if you encode the character in Unicode. ;-) This is without even take into account that this information can be heavily compressed for the transfert.

There's 144 million phones with it deployed, the figure is the total for them all.

I read "that amount of data from each Android/Blackberry phone would be a lot more thn 10 GB a day." as "each device is generating over 10 GB a day." It makes more sense as a total, and really, 10 GB a day is NOTHING. In scientific computing, terabytes a day isn't too unusual, so it's certainly no big deal to store and process 10 GB a day.

First, don't trust a recruiter's technical information.

Second, maybe they are selling the information to other parties by letting the other parties grab the information themselves.

When you can show me a tcpdump of your password being sent to CarrierIQ I will believe they are capturing your password.

All I've seen proof of so far is that it is capable of doing so because of how it is called before everything for anything, but let's not jump to conclusions here.

And, as been pointed out repeatedly in discussions about the "security" domain, when you add an ability, you inherently add a vector for that ability to be abused.

Even if "raw data" are not currently being uploaded, how thin is the line between this being turned off and it being turned on? And who is in control of that decision?

At an absolute minimum, the situation demands transparency.

As for me, I'm a step closer to being firmly in Stallman's camp.

Adb logcat showing the usb debugging output isn't really the same as storing on a file or uploading to a remote server, is it?

They're obviously doing bad stuff, but I see no evidence of uploading your keystrokes

Neither drivebyacct2 nor the video claims the data is stored. Carrier IQ is collecting keystroke data, which you said they were not doing. The video clearly shows, when the user presses the "1" key:

  com.htc.android.iqagent.action.ui01
  actionUI01:49,0

where 49 is the keycode for the "1" key. This means the Carrier IQ code is called to collect and process this event information.

We just don't know what the code is doing with this information. Perhaps it is simply updating statistics and discarding it. So I guess your argument with drivebyacct2 is on the definition of "collecting"...

People aren't writing novels on their SmartPhones. The typed input from a normal volume of text messages, e-mails, and URLs is actually pretty minute when you think about it. Certainly it would be compressed before being uploaded to their servers. IIRC they cite 140 million active devices so if you figure 3kB per day, which is probably on the high side, that's only 400GB before compression. You can compress text down by about 90% these days. That works out to only 44GB of data uploaded per day.

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