just wondering if att or apple listen to phone calls that are done on the iPhone for whatever reason, or if they track where you go and what places you visit to help them create "better" software for the iPHone user.
just a little paranoid of the New World Order.
If you're really that paranoid, you shouldn't be carrying a cell phone.
Basically, you're at no more risk of eavesdropping/government tracking on AT&T than with any other carrier. And when I say that, it should be inferred that ALL of the Tier 1 wireless carriers in the US have cooperated with the government on eavesdropping. The only known company to resist is Qwest, but they only resell wireless service these days, and only in a limited area.
If the government wants to, they can track and eavesdrop on calls and text messages regardless of what cell phone or carrier you have. The iPhone doesn't put you at more or less risk for this.
WILL they eavesdrop on you? In reality, they're (probably) not going to listen in on the phone calls of random people just for giggles. But if you do something to catch the government's attention or annoy them enough, then you should probably act under the assumption that you're being tracked/listened to.
You've probably "annoyed" the government or gotten their attention if you:
a. Are a terrorist or say nice things about terrorists
b. Do not-so-nice-things online
c. Commit crimes and talk about them a lot on your cell phone, e-mail or in SMS, or
d. Loudly say things about
The War that would
make the Baby Bush cry.
This is of course, an incomplete list, and can expand at will depending whether the current administration feels like trampling on the constitution again today.
About record keeping...
Call records: AT&T, like all other companies, generally keeps an archive of your bills for the past two years (or for as long as you've been with them, whichever period is shorter). Those bill archives tend to list who you called (or who called you), when those calls took place, ad how long the call lasted. Audio archives of calls are NOT kept by AT&T. However, law enforcement will archive recorded calls if they have a wiretap active.
Text messages: records of the date/time and sender/recipient of text messages are listed on the bills, so they too are kept archived for two years. The content of those messages are NOT recorded on the bills, and AT&T claims they keep message content for a maximum of 72 hours (mainly to help ensure people get their messages if their phones are off or if they're out of a coverage area). But again, all bets are off if the government has a warrant or FISA letter and finds you interesting.
You can see these archives for yourself by logging into AT&T's Online Account Manager (or the online account manager of your wireless carrier of choice) and look for past bills in the "view my bill" section. There, in all their glory, are up to two years' worth of your past bills.
The one industry stand-out to all of this is
SkyTel, the paging company. As the
Mayor of Detroit has discovered, SkyTel routinely archives ALL text messages sent or received on their network for a period of
up to 5 years. They archive
everything: what was said, who it was said to, and even what the message was in response to, if it was a reply. And evidently, they'll cough up this info to just about anyone who asks: be it detectives, government representatives, or newspapers like the Detroit Free Press. I'll leave it up to you as to whether or not that was a good thing in the case of Detroit, but if you're trying to keep your communications private (or doing naughty sexual/politically corrupt deeds), then from your perspective being a SkyTel customer is very, very bad indeed.
So if you're paranoid, don't get a SkyTel pager. But then, why anyone in modern times would get a
pager, is beyond me.
Lastly, MetroPCS is a publicly traded company. They are not government owned-operated. Not sure where you got that from.
