Senator Al Franken (D-MN), was the first lawmaker to come out against the controversial mobile intelligence software company Carrier IQ, releasing an open list of questions to the company’s founders in early December and demanding answers within two weeks.
The deadline has come and gone, and although Carrier IQ CEO Larry Lenhart and the company’s vice president for marketing Andrew Coward did visit Washington on Monday and Tuesday to speak to Franken’s staff and staff members of other lawmakers, Franken still isn’t entirely satisfied with the answers he’s received.
However, Franken, who is also Chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on privacy, did obtain and publish on his website Thursday all of the detailed written responses he received to his numerous questions regarding Carrier IQ’s software from the company and its customers, including AT&T, Sprint, Samsung, and HTC, which are revealing in themselves, indicating just how many U.S. devices have the software installed — upwards of 30 million, 26 million Sprint devices alone.
As Franken wrote in a statement reflecting on the responses he received:
“I appreciate the responses I received, but I’m still very troubled by what’s going on,” said Sen. Franken. “People have a fundamental right to control their private information. After reading the companies’ responses, I’m still concerned that this right is not being respected. The average user of any device equipped with Carrier IQ software has no way of knowing that this software is running, what information it is getting, and who it is giving it to-and that’s a problem. It appears that Carrier IQ has been receiving the contents of a number of text messages-even though they had told the public that they did not. I’m also bothered by the software’s ability to capture the contents of our online searches-even when users wish to encrypt them. So there are still many questions to be answered here and things that need to be fixed.”
Franken’s statement contains numerous good points, perhaps most trenchant of all the fact that Carrier IQ was in fact recording and transmitting users’ SMS messages, although the company noted in a Monday release that this was “unintentional,” due to a software “bug” that’s since been corrected, and that the SMS messages were transmitted in a binary, “non-human readable format,” which Carrier IQ would have had to write separate software to decode, but it says it did not do.
Franken also noted that he is anticipating responses from carrier T-Mobile and phone manufacturer Motorola, now owned by Google, on their use of Carrier IQ’s software by December 20. Stay tuned.
Correction: This post originally stated that Carrier IQ executives Larry Lenhart and Andrew Coward spoke with Franken and other lawmakers, when, in fact, the executives met with the staffs of those lawmakers. We’ve since corrected the error in copy and regret it.
