Miami Law Firm Files First in Florida Lawsuit Claiming Smartphone Manufacturers and Software Company Secretly Tracking Private Data
Class action suit believed to be one of the first in the country.

MIAMI, FL, December 09, 2011 /24-7PressRelease/ -- On Friday December 2, 2011, Miami-based Litigation Partners, LLC filed a class action lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida on behalf of cell phone users who claim that their private smartphone activities have been tracked and recorded by a program secretly embedded within the phones' operating software. The complaint alleges that Samsung phones using the Android Operating System and Research in Motion BlackBerry phones were pre-installed with a computer program called "Carrier IQ" which intercepts, tracks, records, and logs the phone users' activities, keystrokes, button presses, Google searches, websites visited, login and password information, emails, phone numbers dialed, location and text messaging contents.

This software, known in technical circles as a "rootkit", enables continued privileged access to a computer while actively hiding its presence from administrators by subverting standard operating system functionality. According to the complaint, the intercepted data was transmitted to the software's manufacturer Carrier, IQ, Inc. in Mountain View California and to the phone manufacturers.

"This covert business strategy strikes at the heart of personal privacy," said Dan Dolan, one of the lawyers representing the phone users. "To be clear, a company no cell phone user has ever even heard of has secretly embedded a spy in every infected phone which watches, listens, and reports on every move a user makes", he added. "Researchers have shown the software tracks personal information, even when a user is off the network, and then, unknown to the user, transmits this personal information to parties who have no right to it," says Dolan, "It's an egregious violation of privacy and it creates a huge security risk for users."

The software was discovered by security consultant Trevor Eckhart, who posted a 17-minute YouTube video which shows every keystroke on his phone being sent to the highly obscured application on the phone before a call, text message, or Internet data packet is ever communicated beyond the phone. Eckhart has found the application on Samsung, HTC, Nokia and RIM devices, and Carrier IQ claims on its website that it has installed the program on more than 140 million handsets. "We're as surprised as anybody to see all that information flowing," Andrew Coward, Carrier IQ's director of marketing, told CNNMoney in an interview. "It raises a lot of questions for the industry -- and not [only] for Carrier IQ." This prompted Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), Chair of the Subcommittee on Privacy Technology and the Law, to pen a letter to the company demanding a full explanation by mid-December.

Press Release Contact Information:

Dan Dolan
Litigation Partners, LLC
PR
2 South Biscayne Boulevard, Suite 3100
Miami, Florida
United States 33131
Voice: 305-371-2692
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