Carrier IQ, the creepy monitoring software on 150 million or so Android devices, Nokias, and iPhones, may constitute a massive violation of privacy laws. The FTC and FCC are looking into it. In the meantime, enjoy your "smart" phone!

The FBI has files from a phone-monitoring company whose notorious software was on iPhones, Android phones, Nokias and BlackBerries. But since the files are being used "for law enforcement purposes," the feds won't talk about their contents. So you can't know what secrets the feds have gleaned from your phone, because that's a secret.

Apparently concerned that it's not already doing enough to undermine local physical retailers across the country, Amazon.com announced it will pay customers up to $5 to go into a local store, scan an item, walk out, and buy the same item on Amazon. Please don't do this cheap, sad thing.

The Twitter-clone Vibe isn't the only app to come out of Occupy Wall Street.

Surrendering to widespread outrage, Google has pulled the Android app "Is My Son Gay?" from its online store, single-handedly making the world safe for gay teens. Yay censorship!

Has Apple's war on Google soared to 30,000 feet? Marcy Simon, erstwhile mistress of Google chairman Eric Schmidt, has taken to Twitter to report her "abuse" at the hands of a United flight attendant.

If your smartphone is one of the millions running Google's Android operating system, keep it off unsecured wifi networks like those at Starbucks. Your entire address book could be at risk. Ugh.

Last year, news that Japanese company Koroko would start manufacturing ultra-realistic android fembots scintillated the world. This week, Koroko unveiled its first "Actroid-F" android, and let's just say that she—and her facial expressions—is insanely, creepily lifelike. Video inside.

Whereas many corporate apps suffer from over-branding and useless functions, this one would actually help me not injure myself and others. Watch the clip and see how it works. Now Android users can be on Oprah's good side.

Apple fanboy? Frequent masturbator? Prepare to be disappointed: Steve Jobs has reiterated his no-smut-on-the-iPhone stance and his Google-sucks stance, writing in an email that "Folks who want porn can buy and [sic] Android phone." [TechCrunch; pic via Fleshbot (NSFW)]

Ha, the family of sci-fi writer Philip "K" Dick is threatening to sue Google for stealing its "Nexus One" phone name from the Dick story that inspired Blade Runner (it also featured Androids, get it??). Google's response: "Nerds." [WSJ]

Groans are issuing from the Googleplex over this year's holiday bonus. In the past, the search engine paid cash — as much as $20,000 or $30,000 per Googler, we hear. This year? A cell phone.

T-Mobile's G1 phone, which runs Google's Android operating system, just doesn't have the cultural icon status of Apple's iPhone. But HTC, the Taiwanese company that makes the G1, revised its 2008 sales forecast up to one million, from an initial 600,000. (For context, Apple sold a million iPhones in the first 74 days.) Silicon Alley Insider asks the burning question: Who here bought one? Are G1 owners somehow different from iPhone evangelists who need to show their superphone to everyone on the bus?

Purchasers of the first Googlephone, T-Mobile's G1, are already discovering that with great power — root access to your phone operating system! — comes great responsibility. There's an as-yet-unpatched bug: If you type the letters "r-e-b-o-o-t", the phone reboots. A-w-k-w-a-r-d. Oh, crud, I just wrote a shell script. [ZDNet]

"When my wife switches, then you'll know," says Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha, whose spouse carries an LG Voyager and refuses to trade it for a Moto. Mrs. Steve Jobs? She carries an iPhone. The company is cutting back from six operating systems to three: Windows Mobile, Moto's own P2K, and Google's open-source Android. Oh, and they're going to lay off a few thousand more people, too. Tough times, tough decisions!

Joel Johnson of Boing Boing Gadgets is shocked, shocked that the team working on Google Earth, Google's 3D interactive world map, launched a mobile app for the iPhone before writing one for Google's Android operating system, which now runs on all of one clunky phone sold by T-Mobile, the also-ran of the U.S. wireless market. He calls the decision "inexplicable." I don't think it's hard to understand at all: Google Earth programmers actually want people to use their app, rather than have gadget bloggers write posts celebrating their clever strategery.

Medialets, a company which tracks which iPhone apps users of Apple's smartphone download from the company's iTunes store, reports that Google's Android Market, a similar service, buy mostly the same kind of apps for their Googlephones. Games, shopping, music, and weather predominate. Google launched Android Market with 62 apps, which were downloaded an average of 7,800 times in the first 24 hours they were available. [Medialets]

At last, the Googlephone is in the wild. But what else lurks as Google lurches into the wireless world? A photo of this giant robot, based on the logo for Google's Android operating system, was fittingly captured by a T-Mobile G1 phone running Android. Can you think of a better caption? Leave your suggestions in the comments, and the best will become the new headline. Yesterday's winner: LychorindaAristaeus, for "The face of a $747 strike price." (Photo by ericajoy)

Brad Fitzpatrick has a Googlephone, and you don't. And what's he doing with his amazing Android-powered toy? Using Google's mobile operating system, Fitzpatrick is coding an automatic garage-door opener, which senses the presence of his phone using Wi-Fi. He can do this because he's already hooked his garage door up to a Web server. Writes Six Apart executive Michael Sippey on this momentous occasion:

Google's Android phone has something in common with Apple's iPhone: Both gadgets have a "kill switch" to uninstall unwanted applications. Buried in Google's Android legalese is a clause that says Google might "discover a product that violates the developer distribution agreement... in such an instance, Google retains the right to remotely remove those applications from your device at its sole discretion." The outrage would be pretty bad if anyone actually had a Googlephone. [CNET]