News: Carrier IQ Lawsuit Includes Apple

Over the last couple of days, news about Carrier IQ tracking users’ information on various smartphones led to an uproar. As expected, a class action lawsuit is already in the works, and Apple has been named as one of the defendants.

Additionally, the lawsuit also includes Carrier IQ itself, HTC, Samsung, Motorola, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile. Verizon does not use the software.

The carriers and manufacturers last month were caught willfully violating customers’ privacy rights in direct violation of federal law. A technology blogger in Connecticut discovered last month that software designed and sold by California-based Carrier IQ, Inc. was secretly tracking personal and sensitive information of the cell phone users without the consent or knowledge of the users. On Nov. 30, 2011, the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary said in a letter to Carrier IQ that “these actions may violate federal privacy laws.” It added, “this is potentially a very serious matter.”

MacRumors further explains Apple’s involvement:

While it appears that the version of Carrier IQ’s software installed on iOS devices is much less capable than that found on Android devices, concerns have still arisen over just what information is being logged and transmitted back to Carrier IQ to be passed on to carriers. For its part, Apple has claimed that it has stopped supporting Carrier IQ in iOS 5 and that it will remove all remaining traces of the service in a future iOS update.