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Tech

Say Hello to Big Brother's Hidden Tracking App

You are being watched.
Janus Rose
New York, US

Ever since the issue came to a head with Apple’s location tracking debacle earlier this year, mobile phone carriers and manufacturers have been adamantly insisting that nothing on a mobile phone is logging or sending sensitive data without the consent of the user. But over the past week, one young researcher seems to have pulled the rug out from under them by exposing software that logs and sends virtually every action taken on millions of devices.

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The software, Carrier IQ, is present on millions of new products across several platforms and manufacturers including Nokia, Blackberry and Android, running stealthily as a service that logs and captures activities on the device. Android developer Trevor Eckhart had begun publicly poking around in the software last week, and was soon met with legal threats from the software company after he declared it to be a ‘rootkit,’ a form of malware that installs and operates on a computer without the user’s knowledge. The company even removed a technical manual that validated Eckhart’s claims from their own website.

Read the rest at Motherboard.