The hits keep right on coming, they just don't stop. Remember the outrage over the spying scandal, the idea our government needed a "court order" to follow terrorists or lawbreakers? Remember how the scrutiny got more pervasive, that all the FBI needed was a national security Letter and it could go after people? Well, it seems thay churned 139,000 of them but technology comes to the rescue. What happened is the mobile phone system that is so convenient has been turned around into a tremendous snooping/ resource tool for all sorts of people.
we first discovered this back several years ago when the National Security people demanded restrictions and dissolution of the Bill of rights in order to get at personal data of all sorts from practically everybody. Remember the pathetic exercise of the Senators
getting pretzel tongue to avoid telling us there were really nasty new features coming?
On the privacy and government snooping front? They couldn't tell us without them being threatened and they didn't dare say boo to the federal Government meanies. So they caved. We thought it was GPS tracking for position, a safety feature sometimes.
However it has become much more than that- Latest privacy violation outrage:
Your AT&T, Sprint handset may be tracking you, thanks to Carrier IQ software "requested by the carriers". 150 million of these handset contain the software which tracks all sorts of data, not just simple operational issues for the carrier's system. http://www.computerworld.com/....
Now here is the interesting thing. Nokia, Samsung, others are distancing themselves from this, claiming they don't do it. I phones up to 5 has something similar but is disabled by the users via Settings, unlike the Carrier IQ software Sprint and AT&T use.
You cannot turn this feature off, regardless of the buttons you push.
Myself, looking back a couple of years at Sprint and the CEO Joseph Nocifera prosecution when he wouldn't go along and what they did after, and how A T&T obliged the Bush administration with listening rooms...well,
I see this as the carriers being faithful lapdogs of the National Security State and requesting the enhanced and non disable type of software from their handset makers to give DHS and the alphabet soup of agencies handy access without Americans knowing about it to your phone and your life and nearly everybody else's.
Any questions? Take them up with the minder errrrr, the fellow listening in!
No coordination in attacks on encampments. Right.
No coordination between the security state and the demands on the mobile phone carriers to put in backdoors and tracking devices like GPS, and now, real time monitoring your apps and personal business to snoop because they can.
I don't believe the other companies' denials. they probably have a similar app from somebody else, a competitor to Carrier IQ. They can say NO! with a straight face to "Have you Carrier IQ?".