Talk:Carrier IQ

CyanogenMod team announced "We would like to assure everyone that Carrier IQ has never, and will never be a part of our Operating System".^[1] • Sbmeirow • Talk • 14:51, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

Please add links to useful articles here...so other authors can use for this article:

• Senator Franken Demands Answers from Company Accused of Secretly Logging Location and Private Information, franken.senate.gov, • Sbmeirow • Talk • 15:19, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
• Carrier IQ: What it is, what it isn't, and what you need to know, engadget.com, • Sbmeirow • Talk • 17:12, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

There are definitely some red flags that need to be watched. The company changed CEO's in August and struck a partnership with a third party (contrary to all claims that third parties were not be involved) Nielsen in October. It's something to keep an eye on. Everything in the history of the company is tracked back to venture capitalists (including its founder) -- and not folks with technology passions. This is what happens when VC's solely rule the nest.Americasroof (talk) 18:43, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Please rewrite and include other viewpoints and facts. This is too focused on the privacy problems and is biased towards a negative view of the topic. - M0rphzone (talk) 19:32, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

there's a positive view?

Doesn't that depend on what information is available?

If there's nothing positive or they're known by most people because of the spying row then i'm not sure how we change that.

So i wouldn't say it was biased, just that the company hasn't done anything notable other than spy on people.

Thanks Jenova20 09:56, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

I don't agree with any of the tags. In an attempt to balance things, I have linked to every single one of their news releases and quoted them at length. Feel free to edit the article to make it comfortaable to edit to meet the requirements of your tags or at least be VERY SPECIFIC on your issues. Tagging articles and not giving specifics on what needs to be fixed is not helpfulAmericasroof (talk) 10:44, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

The article is perceivably WP:UNDUE and judging by some of the foul language that was used when it was first deleted, there may possibly be a smack of COI or even possible IP WP:SPI. The lead and History section are together 371 words while the History part of the page is not an an article at all and looks more like a staccato timeline just to provide some corporate background for the apparent rant that follows (1,426 words), and should be condensed into prose. I appreciate that a word count is a poor metric, but Wikipedia is not a newpaper and the policy (not a mere guideline here) should be followed very carefully in order to ensure that the article is about the company and not appearing to be a news carrier for the controversy that surrounds it. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 11:30, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

the criticism section is neutral and well sourced, it even gives the response from Carrier IQ. Just because the article has a large criticism section, that doesn't strike me as WP:UNDUE, it tells me that no one knows anything about this company other than the very notable press coverage for spying recently and so there isn't much else to mention.

Are you suggesting removing lots of notable information just because there isn't much else in the article?

Thanks Jenova20 11:49, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Actually what I said above were observations based on how I read the article from a purely neutral standpoint of someone who has no interest whatsoever in the company nor in the outcomes of the current news sensation. I have drawn attention to various policies lest they be understandably unknown to the contributors to the article - policies are often walls of text, sometimes ambiguous, and never easy to understand and follow. Apart from condensing the History section into a proper flow of prose, I have not made any other suggestions how the article should be processed, I'm sure that those who are working on it now will be aware that Wkipedia is not a newspaper, that encyclopedias record history, and there is no hurry for any articles, and that the finished article will be an accurate chronicle of some notable outcome regarding something a software company did right or wrong. What perhaps needs to be established however is whether the company is notable in its own right, or whether the article falls under WP:1E, and if it does, then WP:CFORK will need to be studied too! What an awful lot of policies and guidelines - I sometimes wonder how I ever managed to learn them myself ;) Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 14:20, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

A while ago i wouldn't have said they were notable, but now as with pretty much everyone else i know they have software on about 140 million phones (notable), they appear to be spying and claiming they don't have software capable of spying (questionably notable) and are now looking at legal action and investigations (notability questionable).

The article doesn't strike me as biased, it just doesn't appear there's anything else on them in circulation except the bad stuff and so sanitizing the article or deleting it would be another bias of covering this stuff up and censoring Wikipedia.

I'll have a look at the two policies you have presented Kudpung.

Thanks Jenova20 14:37, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

I don't think either of your policies are applicable this time.

• WP:1E yes if this company did not already have notability for the amount of users they have before the spying row or for any other work they have done.
• WP:CFORK not at all, since this information would have to be here since the article already existed (i think) and would otherwise have to be in the articles for: Blackberry, Android, iOS, Symbian?, WP7.

This is far easier and more appropriate than pasting it in 4,5 or 6 articles.

What do you think?

Thanks Jenova20 14:52, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

I try to put myself in the position of the average reader, and to me it looks like an article about a controversy, with the name of a company as its Wikipedia page name. If Carrier is a major supplier on that scale to manufactures of phones, then there must be some substantial info about them out there somewhere. Industry awards? Reports in the established financial press of their being awarded major contracts? Extraordinary growth in share value? Impact on employment in their local community? Technical innovations? - not everything is available on line. On the other hand, content forking, or more accurately a split, needs to be looked at. I once started an article about a town and before I realised it, there was more in it about its famous local product than about the town itself, and one drive-by tagger tagged it as an advert. So I split off the part of the product into a separate article. Today, both articles are WP:GA. Forks are sometimes used for the wrong reasons, especially POV pushing, but I see an eventual possibility here, and it wouldn't need to be 4 or 5 articles. There could, for example, be a standalone article for Carrier, then an article called something like the Carrier vs. X controversy. All that would need to be done is to put a 'see also' on the articles of all the major parties concerned, some well thought out redirects, and some good Wikilinking. Nonetheless, the article about the affair would have to be written from a neutral encyclopedic view. It's one way of avoiding the top heavy aspect of the present article. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 16:08, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

So the easiest way is to add more to other sections of the article to padd them out or split the controversy into a new article?

And what is a kudpung anyway? It sounds like a noise you would hear if you dropped a pie in a tin down the stairs (and that would be my educated guess).

Thanks Jenova20 16:15, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

This article appears to have been written from the standpoint of elaborating in great detail every minutiae of the current controversy as it was happening. If the controversy officially ended tomorrow with Carrier IQ exonerated then the current level of detail would look quite inappropriate and out of place in a few months' time. This is the difficulty of writing about current issues and we have to work on this article with the lasting significance in mind. The whole thing will need to be edited down, avoiding excessive detail so it reads more like a summary (detail is available in the sources, we link to those for a reason you know) and restructured in a more sensible way. For example why is the controversy covered under multiple disconnected level 2 (==) headings? Why is "Updates" used as a section title?
On the other side of things, it also scores poorly on tone and neutrality. As much as I think CIQ deserves everything it gets for sending a cease and desist to that guy, a number of reputable articles appeared last week suggesting that the controversy might be overblown and CIQ might only be doing what they say they're doing after all (eg, ). Their absence has been noticed, especially given how feverish editing has been to cover every other aspect. Quoting CIQ's entire response verbatim does not neutrality make. Similarly the article uses phrases like, On December 1, 2011, Carrier IQ issued a "clarification" to its November 23 statements - why is 'clarification' in inverted commas if not to send a message to the reader about the author's opinion of CIQ's statement?
I am willing to help here, but not until the dust has settled a little and certainly not unless other people recognise the problems. – Steel 17:00, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

I agree with most of your criticism there but would argue against trimming and instead giving the criticism a separate article or just leaving it as most of the notability of this company appears to be on the basis of the spying.

I dont't agree it takes up much space at all though, it's just very informative about what has happened and the rest of the article is rather lacking in information.

Thanks Jenova20 17:30, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Does anyone have a problem with me removing the massive quote in the "updates" section?

It's a huge paragraph and most of it is already mentioned in part.

Thanks Jenova20 10:11, 6 December 2011 (UTC)

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/news/tracking-software-caught-snooping-on-millions-of-smartphone-users-6606335 "Tracking Software Caught Snooping on Millions of Smartphones", "Security researcher Trevor Eckhart has discovered what appears to be a flagrant new intrusion into smartphone users’ privacy: Monitoring software by a company called Carrier IQ that comes automatically installed on Android, Blackberry, and other smartphones, records every interaction a user has with the device, and then beams that information off the phone." by Glenn Derene December 1, 2011 12:00 PM

See Computer surveillance 99.19.40.211 (talk) 07:31, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Sources in the article and information available is currently up to date and adequate.

Thanks for the reference though Jenova20 09:13, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Added an explanation of why Carrier IQ's points regarding the alleged privacy of their spyware package are moot, but forgot to sign in first.. Zaphraud (talk) 06:43, 23 May 2013 (UTC)