As consumers most people are pretty dumb. You buy a product off the shelf and you trust that it’s safe to use, and why wouldn’t you, you paid good money for it didn’t you? Well in these days of high technology the use of mobile devices is certainly not safe by any means.
Mobile Device manufacturers like RIM (Blackberry), Apple (Iphone, Ipad) and others are not much different to buying poisoned apples (excuse the pun) at your local food market. The reason is that your mobile device tracks every single move you make, every key you press, every web site you visit, every call you made or received, it even tracks where you were at the time. What’s most disturbing is how these vendors who take your money in exchange for their product simply try to keep this information under wraps.
Well, thanks to the large community of users, these “secrets” are always discovered and exposed to the masses and as such I am helping to expose the hidden Event Log of a Blackberry phone. Sure the information is out there if you search for it but the more web sites that reference this, the better.
First off to see all the information that is currently logged on your Blackberry right now, do the following:
Hold down the ALT key and keep it down …. now press LGLG and then let go of the ALT Key. Whoa baby, you’re looking at your event log. For interest sake go to some of the entries like “a net.rim.browser” and look through some of the entries by clicking on them one at a time, you’ll see every web page you visited, the full url, date time etc. Interesting stuff isn’t it?
Now click the Blackberry button and choose “CLEAR LOG” and it wipes the entire log.
Now there are numerous privacy issues here but another big problem with this event log is how it slows down your phone. Have you ever found that when you’re doing a lot of browsing on your blackberry how your phone keeps getting slower and slower? Sure you have. Well due to the insane amount of logging going on it’s no wonder your phone slows down and it also makes you wonder WHY you spent good money buying the latest mobile device which promised to be faster when it’s actually slower due to all the privacy invasion going on.
So now you ask, how do I turn this logging off? Well YOU CAN’T !!! Simple as that. RIM have hardcoded it into the Blackberry Shell Operating System and you cannot turn it off. But you can automate your phone to clear the log every hour.
A software author going by the name of Phrehnck from Los Angeles in the US created an application called “LogMaid” and has made this available for free to all Blackberry users.
You can download LogMaid from this link. You’ll need to create an account in order to download the application but the actual application is FREE. The application auto clears your event log every hour on the hour, it does this as long as your phone is idle (backlight off) when the time comes to clear the logs. LogMaid also invokes Blackberry’s built in memory cleaner, kick starts the Java Garbage Collector and Logs an Event letting you know the logs were cleared.
What’s amazing is after clearing your logs, let your phone operate as normal and after 15 minutes open the log file again (ALT+LGLG) and see just how much information has been logged inside of 15 minutes.
It’s time consumers start to challenge the creators of these products who violate our privacy without even mentioning it to us, it makes you wonder exactly what else they are doing that they are not telling us about. Are they downloading these logs at any point? Nobody seems to know, but there are indeed ways of finding this out. If they want to know our every move, they should be handing these devices out for free and not charging money for it.
One thing is for certain … every year BIG BROTHER tightens the noose around our necks and takes away more and more of our freedoms.
