Oh NOes!! Your Cell Phone Might Be Spying On You!!

And if thats news to you have a bridge to sell you…..

Seriously, I got a smart phone with every expectation that Verizon was going to go to the legal limit (and possibly push that limit as hard as possible) to get information on what I do with it and when.  That doesn’t make it RIGHT, but I KNEW that it would happen.  Therefor when the recent announcement hit that many phones, sold by many carriers, contain software that can keylog and send back that information I wasn’t surprised.  Now according to the linked article my phone, sold by my carrier, does not contain this particular piece of software.  However I fully expect it contains something very similar that no-one’s found yet.  That concept will eventually piss me off to the point of rooting the phone and fixing the issue, till then I understand that everything I do on that phone is potentially being sent off to someone.  After all, this is Verizon we’re talking about.

Seriously.  When I first got my Droid2 I was rather disgusted by the amount of bloatware that came pre-installed, and even more so when I discovered that the only way to get rid of it was to root the phone.  But I was outright PISSED when, a week after getting the phone, I discovered that one of those pieces of bloatware was an app (*cough* City ID *cough*) that was sending all my incoming call information off to a 3rd party, without my permission, no way to opt out, and no way to turn it off till the “FREE NO COMMITMENT TRIAL!!!!111!!!!” ended and I could finally tell them to go to hell.  It wasn’t even a useful piece of software, it was supposed to tell you the city and state that the person was calling from, in reality all it did was ID the city/state where the PHONE NUMBER originated from, so if you got your cell phone in NY state, and kept your number when you moved out of state, City ID would still ID the call as from AnyCity NY.  I’m guessing I wasn’t the only one complaining since when Husband upgraded his Droid to a Droid3 City ID didn’t come preinstalled.

So yah, if you were really under the illusion that everything you did on your smart phone was private you need to get a life…….

Edited to add: this doesn’t mean that I think we SHOULDN’T take apart any company who breaks the law in this manor, just that I’m totally unsurprised that it happened.