Talk about black kettles and pots! Eric Schmidt of Google has popped up to say that Google doesn’t support Carrier IQ’s approach and described its software as a ‘keylogger’. Ouch! By Ian Scales.
Now personal data collector-in-chief, Google’s Eric Schmidt, has put the boot in to Carrier IQ when he addressed a Google-hosted conference on internet freedom in the Hague this week - despite the fact that Google itself has been caught out actually collecting and storing personal data from WiFi hotspots (amongst other things).
Schmidt said that because Android was an open platform “people can make software for it that’s not very good for you,” and he indicated that Carrier IQ was an example of the wrong approach because the software had been pre-installed and users were unable to disable it.
In fact the story has a familiar arc. ‘Yes’, the software and the system behind it does have the capability to store keystrokes (it can record any event which takes place on the phone); but ‘no’ the 140 million handsets already installed with the software do not do that - at least that’s what’s claimed by the company.
But the problem is not really to do with what the software is actually doing, but to do with the fact that the carriers using it were not being transparent about it to their users and didn’t offer any ‘opt-out’ for those worried about data security. Then, just to make the situation worse, when the story first broke Carrier IQ tried to gag the whistle-blower rather than hold its hands up and openly explain.
In an interview on TelecomTV, Andrew Coward, VP of Marketing at Carrier IQ categorically denies that his company’s software is used to collect users’ keystrokes.
Who can you believe? Watch our Breaking News video below.
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