All About Carrier IQ: What is it and How to find it

Carrier IQ maintains they summarize performance information to help improve the quality of a carrier customer experiences, but what if you do not want anyone else to have access to the sort of fine-grained data that Carrier IQ is capable of accessing? Here is how you can figure out if your phone is affected, and how to go about fixing things if it is.

Does your phone have Carrier IQ?

Eckhart original report has shown that Carrier IQ has been discovered on HTC and Samsung devices, and that CarrierIQ counts Sprint among their domestic carrier clients. AT&T also appears to use Carrier IQ on their devices: a member of the XDA-dev forums called AT&T and was told that Carrier IQ is indeed preloaded on the HTC Vivid. Other carriers, including Verizon, Vodafone, and O2 have all denied that they use Carrier IQ on their devices.

Nokia and RIM were also among the companies that Eckhart claimed CarrierIQ provided their "mobile intelligence" services to, but they have vociferously denied the connection. The Verge also reports that the three devices in Google Nexus line are free of the logging service, so Nexus devotees can rest easy.

What do I do about it?

Well, you could just live with it, but I will admit that it is not a terribly appealing option. iOS users who want to disable logging have it pretty easy here: chpwn believes that in iOS 5, CarrierIQ is enabled during the initial setup process if you opt-in to sending log back to Apple. Since that is the case, all it takes to disable Carrier IQ is to jump into Settings/About/Diagnostics & Usage, and change the setting to Do not send.

Uninstall Carrier IQ with the Logging Test app.

This is about as straightforward as the process gets: once you have installed the aforementioned app, pay the $1 for the Pro key in the Android Market. Once you have done that, the option to remove Carrier IQ will be unlocked in the app, although ExtremeTech notes that the process may not always be successful.