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by franksalim 5308 days ago
I'm surprised the author didn't jump on this sentence:

"With any diagnostic data sent to Apple, customers must actively opt-in to share this information..."

As I understand it, Carrier IQ is about sending data to carriers. Apple only denied that data was silently sent to Apple. That's completely different than saying no data has been transmitted at all.

6 comments

While that is a good observation, it has been proven that no statistical data is sent to CarrierIQ when the preference is disabled. This has been determined by reverse engineering the daemons used for CarrierIQ reporting on various iOS versions.

This has more information: http://blog.chpwn.com/post/13572216737

From the description of "Diagnostics & Usage" reporting on the device itself, it sounds as though the carriers can only obtain that data via Apple. This would reconcile that wording with the finding that selecting "Don't Send" appears to disable Carrier IQ logging as well.

[..] To help Apple’s partners and third-party developers improve their apps, products and services designed for use with Apple products, Apple may provide such partners or developers with a subset of diagnostic information that is relevant to that partner’s or developer’s app, product or service, as long as the diagnostic information is aggregated or in a form that does not personally identify you.

http://daringfireball.net/misc/2011/12/ios-5-diagnostics-pri...

Wasn't one of the iPhone jailbreak devs quoted on twitter last night as saying that CIQ is only enabled (at all) if you enable diagnostic logging?
I'm sorry but upon Chpwn's investigation, didn't iOS version of the Carrier IQ software only record a few items such as your phone number, your country, your active phone calls and location data if activated? Any of which your carrier would already know anyway?
I think, it would be a major issue if it was later revealed they deliberately misled the public with this sentence.

I think the more logical interpretation is that if they (Apple) don't receive any data then no other party receive any data.

At the risk of driving an accusation of conspiracy theory, I'm reading that sentence exactly the same way. This is a "non-denial denial". They're denying something not alleged in the hopes that it distracts or confuses people about the real issue.