Last year’s Carrier IQ controversy may be getting some legislative help in the form of a law that would require the explicit consent of a mobile device owner before such monitoring software could be used.

When the Carrier IQ scandal broke at the beginning of December, Research in Motion took the unusual step of saying it doesn't install Carrier IQ on BlackBerry smartphones and doesn’t authorize the carriers that sell BlackBerry devices to do it either. When presented with the evidence that those carriers have ignored RIM’s ban on Carrier IQ, the company took matters into its own hands.