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.

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.

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.

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...

"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

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.

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

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

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.

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 ;)

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.

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.

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()

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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

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.

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

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

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"...

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.

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".

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.

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.