When CarrierIQ was dubbed one of the Fierce 15, they were working with seven of the top ten major OEM’s, as well as Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and Sprint. Currently, Trevor has found CarrierIQ in a number of Sprint phones, including HTC and Samsung Android devices. CarrierIQ is confirmed to be found on the iPhone or on feature phones, but Trevor has found RIM’s Blackberry handsets and several Nokia devices with CarrierIQ on board as well.
But that was a passing mention and I haven't found anywhere else to back up that claim.
I doubt the iPhone uses this, but don't kid yourself, it has the ability to monitor everything you do on that phone.
From a practical standpoint, manufacturers and service providers want that ability. But it's how they intend to use the information that counts. Nobody has proven to me so far that it's entirely benign.
When you say "it has the ability to monitor everything", do you mean that it would be entirely possible for Apple to build something into their phones to do this if they chose, or that they have already done it?
The first one of those is clearly true - Apple has control over hardware and software and could put pretty much anything they wanted in there to track your activity.
The second one is, to my knowledge, pure speculation. Apart from their anonymous stats - that you are able to opt out of - I've seen nothing to suggest that anything similar to this on iPhone.
You asked for proof that the data is correctly and securely used. That is what cannot be proved, regardless of your trust in the company or lack thereof.
Carriers don't have access to the source code AFAIK, correct me if I'm wrong but they can only change the "cellular" part of the phone (baseband, carrier packages, etc).
You don't need access to the full code of the OS, just enough to write kernel drivers. Once your code is running at ring0, you can rootkit away. I wonder how similar iPhone kernel development is compared to Mac OSX?
I think Apple actually customizes the firmware packages for each carrier since they maintain separate versions for ATT/Verizon for each iPhone model...
I don't even have an iPhone nowadays, I'm just curious. :)
That doesn't seem to be the case when I've looked into the firmware updates. The reason they have different iPhones for ATT and Verizon is they are using completely different radio systems. The firmware updates aren't carrier specific or else the online jailbreaking guides (many include ipsw checksum) wouldn't work in different countries.
Since what CarrierIQ is doing is considered illegal in many countries I'm fairly sure Apple wouldn't want to open themselves up to that type of liability.
It doesn't use this, but if you check the diagnostic dumps in iOS5 (it's buried somewhere in settings) you'll see it gathers pretty much simillar data (I've seen battery status, app installation, free space etc. in there).
What remains to be seen if any of that data is sent to Apple if you opt out of "diagnostic data" sending.
I base my personal guess of "no" on the fact that Carrier IQ is currently advertising several job openings that ask for deep knowledge of Android internals, and zero job openings requiring similar iOS experience.
Of course, the possibility remains open that Apple simply implemented something similar in-house.
