Does your cellphone have Carrier IQ's spyware?
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God I hope not.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty tired of learning how businesses are getting away with tracking and capturing information about me that should have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
I've purchased my phone. I've paid for my contract. There is no need for a company to cry poor when I'm paying for my services. If they were giving it away for free, then I get what I pay for.
This is getting ridiculous. I'd love to know if the CEOs and upper management of these phone companies have the spyware disabled on the phones they create to protect their privacy, but have no problems spying on me.
Missing Option: Used To (Score:5, Insightful)
Mine used to have it there when it was running the default Sprint and HTC approved software, but it's been exclusively AOSP via CyanogenMod for over a year now.
A symptom of the North American cellular market (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what happens when stupid consumers let carriers control the market for phones by insisting that $500 is too much to pay upfront, opting instead to sign on for three-year $3000 contracts. But the phone is free, right?
Carriers should be dumb pipes, selling an interchangeable and undifferentiated service, viciously competing against each other on the price of data and the quality of service. This is the future they desperately fear, so instead they try to market the phones as if they themselves had anything at all to do with the services you can access or the software that Google wrote. They give their phones idiotic carrier-specific names like the the Incredible, the Enlighten, or the Illusion, trying to cultivate their own little brands.
Innovation happens at HTC, Google, Samsung, LG, etc. Carriers have exactly nothing to do with it, and need to be put into their proper places as vendors of connectivity. The next time you buy a phone, buy unlocked. Don't be afraid to pay a little more up-front: beating a small discount out of the sales droid will more than make up for it, and you'll get a phone that hasn't been fucked with.
You wouldn't buy a laptop from your ISP; why the hell would you buy your handheld computer from one?
Re:Nexus One (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, well, if Google says you're not being spied on, then you must be OK.
Re:What about desktop computers (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course it is: they all come with Microsoft Windows installed.
Re:A symptom of the North American cellular market (Score:3, Insightful)
Ideally, we should reach a point where I don't have a plan with a single carrier. My phone, when it wants to send some data, should poll each of the networks with coverage in my area, asking how much they'd charge to transfer packets with a certain minimum service level, and pick the lowest bidder. That's competition on millisecond timescales, instead of the multi-year timescales between locked-in contracts.
Re:Stop the madness (Score:3, Insightful)
I use to think programmers had some level of morals and ethics.
Why would programmers be different from other professionals? If the pay is good enough, someone is going to do it.
Think of this: if you don't take the money some asshole is going to take it. So why should you, a good enough guy, pass this opportunity and let the asshole take all the money? Surely you're going to put the money to better use than that bastard would, you even donate to charity once a year. People should be thankful you took the job, if someone is going to do it it might as well be you.
See, with a little effort one can even trick oneself into thinking this is okay.
Cyanogenmod (Score:4, Insightful)