Apple stops CarrierIQ support

CarrierIQ is a suspicious logging software that has all of the sudden emerged from nowhere. It has not even been one day since its emergence within which the mobile phone manufacturers and the mobile operators are taking appropriate actions to tranquilize the customers. Indeed even Apple has announced that it ceased the support offered to CarrierIQ.

As mentioned by Apple, the company stopped the support provided to CarrierIQ with the iOS 5 in almost all the products that are existing and it will also remove it thoroughly in its future updates of software. If Apple receives any diagnostic data then the customers must share about the information openly and the provided data will be send anonymously in an encrypted form so that it does not posses any kind of personal information.

The company has also mentioned that it has never kept a track or recorded any messages, keystrokes or other kind of personal information that is received for the diagnostic data and it also has no such plans in future.

As mentioned above, the CarrierIQ is nothing but an app to log the data secretly and it applies to those data that is capable of logging keystrokes. This app was first discovered on Android, Nokia and Blackberry phones by Trevor Eckhart, a software developer. He even published a video on his findings and this raised a serious concern on the privacy issue and also received a huge criticism.

Following all this, Grant Paul, an iPhone jailbreak software developer confirmed that he also found some references of the CarrierIQ software in the iOS 5 and this issue spread across the industry. This is the reason behind the prompt reaction of Apple now. But Apple is not the sole company that has acknowledged the existence of this data logging software on the iOS but also Sprint and AT&T did.

Even other companies like Nokia, Verizon and RIM declared their affirmations on this controversy but they claimed that they are not using this software. The spokeman of CarrierIQ strictly denies that it is a software with the intention to spy the users. The company claims that it takes a look at several aspects of performance of a device like summarizing and counting the performance but does not record the keystrokes or offer any kind of tracking tools.