Monday, December 5, 2011

Your Android may spy on you | Carrier IQ

An Android developer recently discovered a clandestine application called Carrier IQ built into most smart-phones that doesn't just track your location; it secretly records your keystrokes, and there's nothing you can do about it.

What is Carrier IQ ?

The software is hidden inside phones there is little you can do to detect that it’s even installed, let alone remove it, and it tracks everything. Keystrokes, browsing and surfing habits, Google searches, and basically every single thing that you are doing on your phone and every button that you press is logged by this software. this is basically a key-logger running on your phone that you didn't know about.



Carrier IQ says in this public statement that it is “not logging keystrokes or providing tracking tools” and that its software is used to track performance, but the video proves entirely otherwise: this app is sitting in between you and the Android OS and is making a note of everything you do.


How to get rid of this serious problem?

There’s no switch that you can turn off in the settings of your phone or software that appears in your app drawer that you can simply uninstall. As far as the GUI of your phone is concerned, Carrier IQ isn’t even there. But it is there, hiding in the background, making sure that you don’t even know it exists.

Fortunately, 

Voodoo Carrier IQ detector application released for Android



A new Android app to identify whether your smartphone has any Carrier IQ tracking/monitoring software installed on it has been released, the Voodoo Carrier IQ detector, giving users a simple way to put their minds to rest on privacy. The handiwork of Android app developer supercurio, the tool is only a few hours old and only partially finished, with the consequent warning that the results can’t be entirely relied on yet. 
To download this application, click 


Click to download source code.

Or Use custom ROM to protect privacy.



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