When asked by US Senator Al Franken about its implementation of Carrier IQ's software, Sprint (News - Alert) gave a quick answer, saying that it installed Carrier IQ on over 26 million handheld devices. The company continues to urge everyone not to worry because the software is only limited to diagnostic data and doesn't peek into the privacy of subscribers to Sprint's carrier services. Sprint added that Carrier IQ is active on 5 percent of mobile devices with the implemented software at a time.

A recent “research request” puts Carrier IQ in a position with Sprint in which it can collect data from 30,000 devices. After hearing of this, Sprint insisted that everything collected is sent in an encrypted format to Carrier IQ and later anonymized. The scary part of what Sprint said has to do with how the company mentioned “anonymized” after mentioning that the data is sent to Carrier IQ.

“Sprint recognizes that it is fair to ask whether the data collected using Carrier IQ software goes beyond ‘technical diagnostics information,’ and Sprint’s answer is unequivocally no,” wrote Vonya McCann Sprint’s vice president for government affairs. To put the icing on the cake, Sprint did not point out which of the devices it sells to customers have the Carrier IQ spyware installed. Carrier IQ also answered to the questions of Senator Franken and took the trouble of writing a long, winding 19-page document about how its software can be used to assist mobile carriers with network operations.

While other companies don't defile customer privacy to such a level (again, we're talking about 26 million devices), companies like AT&T still pull data from 900,000 of its customers using Carrier IQ as well. 575,000 of those phones are volunteered forcibly to participate in a data collection for “wireless and service performance information.” There's only one logical question to ask: Why don't these companies allow people to opt in to the data collection instead of doing it in the background?