Perspective on Carrier IQ

You might have heard about the company Carrier IQ and what was initially reported as a nefarious plot to report all activities on your mobile phone to ... well, nobody was quite sure where. Seth Weintraub at 9to5Google clarified some of the initial confusion, and that short piece is the best summary I could find after a quick scan of recent Daring Fireball entries. I don't have a good overview of the story since I wasn't going to mention it at all and therefore didn't keep track of what I had read. However, that changed when I found what is perhaps the best dose of common sense I've seen on this subject from a commenter dubbed "plus MEDIC" in Rob Beschizza's piece "Today in corporate denials: Carrier IQ edition":

How ridiculous are all of you concerned to such a degree about Carrier IQ? For the love of god, you're using their network. How do I put emphasis on this? YOU'RE USING THEIR NETWORK. Your phone calls and text messages and photos don't reach their end destination via magic. It's routed over their towers. Your phone calls aren't encrypted. Your SMS aren't encrypted. Your photos aren't encrypted. As they pass through their towers, they have every single bit of information, less the diagnostic information that Carrier IQ is providing them, about what you're doing. They have the content, the time, the recipient, their replies. That information is there, and they have access to it already.

Most followups to plus MEDIC's comment complained that this isn't proper, but couldn't argue that this isn't true. (The question of whether the information gathered included interactions via WiFi rather than the cellular network isn't clear, at least to me. If non-cell network interactions are also monitored and reported, that's definitely wrong.)

We have very, very few genuinely private spaces, physical or otherwise, in our lives these days. I don't like that, and you might not either, but we'd be fools not to recognize that truth.