Carrier IQ denies phone tracking claims

Dec 2, 2011, 17:26 GMT

San Francisco - The company whose software is the focus of a smartphone spying scandal has denied that its products track or report the contents of users' text messages or internet activity to phone makers or mobile carriers.

Carrier IQ, whose software is installed on over 140 million devices, told the Wall Street Journal that the program does not record keystrokes, but uses diagnostic information from the phone to help phone makers and carriers improve performance.

'If there's a dropped call, the carriers want to know about it,' Carrier IQ's VP of Marketing Andrew Coward told the paper's AllThingsD blog.

'So we record where you were when the call dropped, and the location of the tower being used ... Similarly, if you send an SMS to me and it doesn't go through, the carriers want to know that, too. And they want to know why - if it's a problem with your handset or the network,' he continued.

'We don't read SMS messages,' Coward adder. 'We see them come in. We see the phone numbers attached to them. But we are not storing, analyzing or otherwise processing the contents of those messages.'

The existence of the hitherto unknown software was revealed earlier this week by security researcher Andrew Eckhart who in a YouTube video said the program was found on Apple, Android, RIM and Nokia smartphones.

Samsung and HTC said they had installed the software at the request of US carriers AT&T and Sprint.

Apple said it had phased out the software starting with the release of its latest mobile operating system iOS5, while Nokia and RIM denied installing the software on their products or authorizing its installation by third parties.