It is a potential nightmare situation – where your phone tracks every keypress, message and location (even when you disable GPS location services). A nightmare, yes. But it is with us already.

A researcher named Trevor Eckhart found that a logging software from a company named Carrier IQ is installed on a number smartphones from multiple manufacturers and carriers, and it tracks every keypress, message and location and sends this information out – all without the user’s knowledge.

Trevor’s research using his Android-running HTC EVO 4G smartphone led to the discovery of this software from Carrier IQ.

You can watch the video of his demonstration below:

Carrier IQ claims that the information collected is to help improve the user experience on mobile devices.

Who Is Guilty?

Carrier IQ is not built into any mobile OS, but is installed at the point of customisation or manufacture by either the carrier or device manufacturer.

HTC have come out to say that they run an opt-in system and have no direct involvement in installing Carrier IQ ion their devices. They point at the carriers.

Microsoft have boldly stated that Carrier IQ is not installed on any Windows Phone. See tweet by Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore.

Apple, who have been recently hit by a privacy storm, have stated that they stopped supporting Carrier IQ in iOS 5, and would completely remove it in future updates.

Through its Blackberry Advisor, Mark Sohm, RIM has stated that it does not pre-install the CarrierIQ application on BlackBerry smartphones and has never done so or authorised its installation.

TechCrunch says:

Eckhart’s 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’s Nexus line are free of the logging service, so Nexus devotees can rest easy.

RIM has responded that “If the CarrierIQ application is present on a BlackBerry smartphone, it does not mean that the CarrierIQ application has “hacked” the BlackBerry platform. It means that either the BlackBerry smartphone user or the user’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server admin explicitly installed the application and authorized it to run“.

The whole Carrier IQ scandal seems to be a US-only issue, so not everyone in the world has to worry about it. Of course, if your phone was imported from the US, especially if branded by one of the fingered carriers, chances are that you are in the picture too.

Stay In the Know

If you use an Android phone – and it is rooted or you are willing to root it – you can run a quick check to find out if Carrier IQ is installed on your phone.

Download Eckhart’s free Logging Test app. Once installed, hit ‘CIQ Checks’ to run the test.

Wrapping Up

If manufacturers and carriers need user feedback, it should be an opt-in system, not something that runs hidden in the system. Also, exactly who is the info sent to, and what is it used for? How safe are the users from exposure?

Questions. Questions.

The US justice department has shown interest in this, and talks of lawsuits are already in the air. This can get very messy, but in my opinion, the public has a right to know what is going on.

This will certainly get more interesting. Comments welcome!

CNN and Nokia today announced a multi-level international collaboration where Nokia becomes a key part of CNN’s roster of mapping providers, delivering its rich mapping services to the international news network. The collaboration harnesses the companies’ strengths in global newsgathering, user-generated content, mapping technologies, and location-based services. The collaboration debuted with the use of Nokia’s 3D Maps across CNN’s platforms in its recent coverage of the British royal wedding.

“This collaboration is a great fit for us as both companies share a similar philosophy on connecting people beyond borders through the combination of compelling news content and highly sophisticated technology,” said Tony Maddox, Managing Director, CNN International. “The international scale of each of our businesses makes the scope of the collaboration particularly exciting.”

“Nokia and CNN share the belief that news is now mobile, powerfully democratic, and can immediately be shared by people around the world,” said Jerri DeVard, Chief Marketing Officer, Nokia. “We are pleased that CNN wants to use Nokia’s innovative mapping services for its international news platforms, and we are excited to work with CNN to deliver a compelling news service to users of Nokia phones.”

The collaboration also includes the CNN App for Nokia which provides mobile access to CNN’s world, business, sport, entertainment and technology reporting, as well as live streaming video. The app also allows users to share CNN’s news via their own social channels, and participate in the reporting process with direct access to CNN’s participatory news community, iReport. The CNN App for Nokia is available in Ovi Store.

People love to take pictures – lots of them. Plus, in this day and age, online social networking sites have made it easy to upload such pictures to share to the world.

What many phone users may be unaware of is that those pictures pose serious potential security risks to them and their loved ones. This is thanks to the same technology that makes many useful features available on their shiny phones.

GPS and Location Services
GPS allows the very location of a phone to be tracked anywhere on the globe. GPS is used by map services, including Ovi Maps and BlackBerry Maps, and Google Maps, among others. With GPS-based services, you can find places all over the world and be guided to those very places. Cool and useful.

GPS is used by popular services like Foursquare as well. Fun, yes.

GPS also allows you to tag pictures taken with your phones with the location at which those pictures were taken. It is good for those times when you are having an adventure out in the wild during a Safari or a holiday. But…

The Other Side
If you do take pictures from a sensitive location, e.g. your home, and GPS tagging is enabled in your phone camera, it means that those same pictures when uploaded are embedded with information on the location of your home.

Are your alarm bells ringing yet? Do you feel like throwing away your phone? Nah; don’t do that yet.

What to Do
Every time you purchase a phone – I mean every single time – one of the first things that you need to check are the GPS, positioning or location settings. Note those three words – “GPS”, “Positioning”, and “Location”.

Find those settings and turn them off.

Also launch your camera and find the option to disable Geo-tagging. Note that word “Geo-tagging”.

Having geo-tagged media uploaded means that the location at which those media were captured can be traced by anyone who knows where to look.

For example, if you upload pictures taken at home or other sensitive places to Facebook, Picasa et al, do yourself a favour and turn off geo-tagging of your pictures and videos. You really do not need the world to be able to find your home.

Use on a Need Basis
When you do need GPS, geo-tagging, or location services, feel free to turn them on and enjoy their use. The potential risks will always be there, yes, but a little caution does not hurt.

Finally, those of us with GPS enabled phones in Nigeria can now at least put them to use, albeit in a limited way.

In the past, most navigation applications that run on GPS enabled devices didn’t come with support for Nigeria and that included the widely popular Google maps. But that has changed now with the release of the latest version (3.0.1.4) of Google maps for s60 devices.
Google maps loaded the map of Lagos when I launched it and it pinpointed my location.

Features like getting direction from your current location to a new location are currently not working, but we can expect that with further updates of the software more and more features will have support for Nigeria.

In case you are itching to see your street on your phone, move over to http://m.google.com on your s60 browser to download the software. And don’t forget to give us feedback of your experiences and impressions.