ACLU files complaint with FTC over older Android software
Good! I hope this has feet and would love to see these carriers raked over the coals.
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The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal complaint Tuesday accusing the nation’s largest wireless carriers of “deceptive” business practices for failing to keep the software on tens of millions of Android smartphones updated — a shortcoming that can make the devices vulnerable to hackers.
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Only one in four Android phones worldwide has the latest generation of the operating system, called Jelly Bean, according to statistics kept by Google, and more than 45 percent run on software first released more than two years ago. Older versions sometimes receive security patches provided by Google, though the process of delivering these to consumers is inconsistent across the dozens of different Android smartphones made by several major manufacturers.
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We really feel this is like a defective product,” said Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist for the ACLU and a former official with the FTC. “The companies know about the flaws, so they should either recall the products or tell consumers so that they can make an informed choice.”
The complaint names the four largest wireless carriers — Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile USA — as parties but not Google, whose relationship with most consumers using Android phones is indirect.
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