Carrier IQ official convinces geek web site, The Register that its software doesn't invade smartphone users' privacy

Andrew Card, Carrier IQ's VP of Marketing, granted an extensive interview with The Register, which seems to believe his contention hat the company's software isn't a keystroke logger vacuum that destroys cellphone owners' privacy.

     Yes, Carrier IQ is a vast digital fishing net that sees geographic locations and the contents of text messages and search queries swimming inside the phones the software monitors, the company's VP of marketing, Andrew Coward, said in an extensive interview. But except in rare circumstances, that data is dumped out of a phone's internal memory almost as quickly as it goes in. Only in cases of a phone crash or a dropped call is information transferred to servers under the control of the cellular carrier so engineers can troubleshoot bottlenecks and other glitches on their networks.

     ...The reason the SMS contents and key taps are monitored at all is so they can be used to invoke Carrier IQ programming interfaces, he continued. Messages or key sequences that contain proprietary tags can be used to manually upload diagnostic information. Those that don't contain the special formatting (such as key taps shown in the developer's demo) dissolve into the ether as soon as they come in.

     “The content of the SMS is never stored and never transmitted,” Coward said.

     His version of the software has been confirmed by Dan Rosenberg, an Android security researcher...
     “What the video is depicting is the application printing out what are known as bugging logs,” he said.
     “It's a way that applications keep a temporary record of the things they were doing so if anything were to break, a developer could go and read that record and figure out what went wrong. That's very different from the application actually recording that information and sending it off to the carrier.”