Check if Your Smartphone Is Being Spied by Carrier IQ (Delete/ Disable Guide)

Do you want to disable/ delete Crarrier IQ tracking application from your smartphone?

Probably you all have heard about Carrier IQ, the application which tracks the activity of some specific smartphone users. It has been discovered by Trevor Eckhart on several smartphones, provided by different mobile carriers.

According to the researches made by Eckhart, Carrier IQ is capable of tracking what kind of applications are running on a mobile phone, it could see the geographic position of a certain cellphone, and even buttons and functions are being used.  The thing is that Carrier IQ will know everything you will be doing with your smartphone and everywhere you will took it.

It sounds scarry but Carrier IQ says that all the data collected from users all around the world will be used only for improving the mobile services. Is this true? TechCrunch has analyzed this problem and has also provided us with a couple of solutions. You need to read the below mentioned paragraphs in order to find out how Carrier IQ works, and more important, how to get rid of the spy located inside your smartphone.

Is Carrier IQ running on your phone?

This is certainly the first question which you asked when you heard about this virtual spy. The first report issued by Trevor Eckhart showed that the tracking application has been installed on HTC and Samsung mobile devices. In US, Sprint and AT&T are using Carrier IQ on different smartphones. In Europe Vodafone, for example, has denied the fact they are using this tracking application on the devices they are selling. Phone manufacturers, like Nokia and RIM (Blackberry) have denied the fact that their devices could have Carrier IQ installed on them. Fortunately, TechCrunch says that you don’t have to trust them. You can check by yourself if your smartphone has a tracking software like Carrier IQ installed on it. Just read the following ideas.

How to get rid of Carrier IQ tracking application from your smartphone?

Download the Logging Test application which has been used by Trevor Eckhart and install it. Then, use the CIQ Checks function and you will instantly know if your phone has been provided with Carrier IQ. If this fact has been confirmed, then you should get rid of that little spy. But in order to do that, you will need to root your smartphone. In order to do that, you have to look for tutorials on Google or search our website (using the search function from the header of this page).

 A custom ROM would delete the Carrier IQ tracking software

If you use an Android smartphone, in order to uninstall Carrier IQ, you could use even the Logging Test application. But this solution is not free. After you have installed the Logging Test application, you need to pay $1 for the Pro version, in android Market. After you have purchased this version, your Logging Test application will provide you with the following option: “remove Carrier IQ”. Unfortunately this solution is not working all the time.

The second solution you have in order to disable/ delete Carrier IQ on an Android phone is to install a custom ROM (operating system). In this case, you will also need to root the device before proceeding with the installation of the custom ROM.

iPhone and Carrier IQ tracking software

iPhone users are a little bit more lucky in this case. No…not that lucky . The Carrier IQ application has been spotted by CHPWN (one of the jailbreak developers) on older iOS versions, like 3.1.3. But the good news is that, for the moment, the application can be turned off from its menu. So, in order to disable Carrier IQ on an iPhone, you just have to access its Menu, go to Settings, About, diagnostics & Usage. Here you need to change the “Send” option in “Don’t send”.

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