Dear Carrier IQ: If you want to track me, you need to ask me first

[Commentary] If you’re online in any way, someone somewhere is probably tracking what you’re doing right now. Snipping pieces of data. Logging your travels. You shouldn’t be startled by this because this has been going on for a long time.

Now, however — in the age of the do-anything-anywhere-device — it’s becoming increasingly important to know just how, why, where, and when you’re being watched. To know what’s being collected, who is collecting it, and who can view that collection. The real problem is the fact that it’s been kept secret. Carrier IQ has partnerships with carriers or device makers, so you never give your consent to this third-party service to allow tracking. Instead, your carrier or phone maker simply covers this data collection in one of its big, confusing privacy disclosure documents you get when you buy into the service or hardware. Secondly, and more importantly, you don’t have any oversight in regard to who can see the data. The way I see it, that’s the real question we have to begin asking about the data that’s collected. It’s not about who grabs it, or where it lives. It’s simply about access.