If you’re like most people, you probably have a phone that tracks your movements and activities. But if you’re not happy with this tracking, there are a few ways to disable it. The first way is to go to your phone’s settings and select “tracking.” There, you’ll find a list of options for disabling tracking. You can choose whether or not to track your movements, the time of day that tracking is enabled, and whether or not to share data with your carrier. If you don’t want your phone tracking anything at all, the next step is to call your carrier and ask them to stop tracking your movements. This will usually require going through their customer service line.
Background: the web has been abuzz for the last week with talk of Caller IQ, a root-level application installed on millions of smart phones including most Android smart phones, BlackBerry units, and iPhones. Not all phones are affected, and at least Verizon has denied using Caller IQ on any of their phones, but there are plenty of phones which are.
The above video is a demonstration by Trevor Eckhart, the Android developer that discovered the application and publicized what it was up to–watch the video to get a better feel for the reach this application has.
The application has sweeping privileges and can access everything you do on your phone. Although cell providers have denied using the application for anything malicious the reality is that the app is quite capable of enabling deep level surveillance without any indication to the end user that their privacy is being compromised.
We don’t know about you, but we’re not comfortable taking the word of a company that they’re not accessing our private data, text messages, and other phone contents when Caller IQ makes it trivially easy to do so–and to remain completely undetected in the process. So the best case scenario is that your provider is not actively collecting data on you, but the Caller IQ rootkit is wasting precious battery life and clock cycles; the worst case scenario is that, unbeknownst to you, it’s radically compromising your privacy in ways you never authorized.
iPhone users have it easy; they can simply navigate to Settings -> General -> About -> Diagnostics and Usage and then toggle it to “Don’t Send”. Android users will need to dig much deeper: if you’re ready to check your phone and remove the Caller IQ installation (something you can’t do simply by uninstalling an app from your system menu as the carriers have made the application invisible to the end user) we highly recommend checking out Lifehacker’s thorough write up covering detection and removal at the link below.
Carrier IQ: How the Widespread Rootkit Can Track Everything on Your Phone, and How to Remove It [Lifehacker]
