There has been a bit of a kerfuffle in the press recently about Carrier IQ – a piece of software that hides on your phone and reports data back to the telephone company. (More technical details here.)

We wanted to know whether New Zealand telecommunications companies are installing this sort of software on the phones they sell to us.

Telecom deny that they used anything of the sort:

No, we do not use Carrier IQ. Our devices do not come loaded with this type of software and we don’t have an agreement with Carrier IQ or any other company that implements tools like this.

Vodafone also deny using such software and make a good point about it contravening the Privacy Act:

Vodafone would never knowingly contravene the privacy act and to the best of our knowledge this software is not on any of the devices we sell.

Telstraclear have also denied it (brevity due to denial being via Twitter):

@TelstraClearNZ No, our devices do not keylog. ^TN

2 Degrees joins the rest:

No, we haven’t. The only customer information 2degrees records is for billing purposes. We don’t monitor our customers’ handset activity or request that any software to do so is installed on devices.

Thanks to @nzkarit on Twitter for his assistance with this article.