Proto-Appliances: The Inkjet Wars

Carrier IQ, Android, and iOS

In 2011, a security researcher named Trevor Eckhart discovered that some Android phones had shipped with a commercial rootkit called “Carrier IQ.” Carrier IQ bills itself as a tool for monitoring and improving mobile-network performance by gathering statistics about dropped calls, signal strength, and so on. But as Eckhart demonstrated, Carrier IQ could do much