Carrier IQ responds to complaints with legal threats
Carrier IQ, in a move intended to make everyone love and respect them, sent this Cease and Desist order to TrevE, the developer who discovered the deep problems inherent in their software, for defamation when he called CIQ a rootkit and pointed out lots of issues. They also threatened legal action for copyright infringement because he posted excerpts from freely-available training documents in his findings.
CIQ told him to make a public renouncement of his claims and issue a public apology via the Associated Press stating all his finding were essentially incorrect . . . or the company would sue for monetary damages within 24 hours. CIQ even went so far as to write a public apology for him so that all he has to do is copy and paste it to the Associated Press.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation decided to take TrevE's case and sent this response, which basically says the copyright claim is completely bogus, the "false allegations" can only be proven false if proven false, and that TrevE may seek remedies of his own for the badgering.
So rather than handle a situation by offering the end-users (us) a removal option or giving us the name of someone to talk to at Sprint, CIQ decided to threaten the person who's poking holes in their huge potentially exploitable security threat. I guess I was wrong when I said Carrier IQ wasn't the problem; it seems they really don't want people looking at what their software does, likely due to concerns that it's going to be exploited.
[xda-developers]
