"What’s more, the company is demanding that Eckhart inform Carrier IQ of the names of all persons to which Eckhart has forwarded the training material. The company also wants Eckhart to send “written retractions” to everybody who has viewed his research in hard copy or on the web."
It is the way with lawyers. They yell at everyone, and anyone who doesn't sit down they roll back and figure out what to do next. The eff link was pretty good on this.
So its 'sane' in the sense that their livelyhood is being threatened and they are fighting back, however their business model is reprehensible so the question becomes whether or not a phone/carrier can use this press to differentiate by advertising "no carrier iq surveillance"
Of course the underlying issue is differentiation and value. Specifically, wireless carriers despise the idea of being data pipe suppliers. I first ran into this at my startup FreeGate when we were selling an appliance that let an ISP hook up a small business to the Internet and provide a better service experience (you could do service via the appliance and the customer didn't have to know anything about the Internet). Anyway, it was a great idea until ISPs realize that just selling cheap internet wasn't going to be sustainable for their business model, they had to sell web site hosting and email and other 'value add' services. Of course our box did all that and the ISP's offering was superfluous. Whoops, there goes one of your channels.
Carrier IQ's business is to collect and codify 'business intelligence' which the carrier can then resell at a markup to third parties. Things like 'this guy just came out of a dealership down the street before he walked into yours' level of details. That is very valuable to people who want to close a sale, its also pretty damn intrusive.
This is one of those places where Stallman's rants on 'free' software get a boost in legitimacy from the real world. Knowing exactly who is controlling the computers you own is serious 21st century business.
Insane.