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.

The news about Carrier IQ that’s been all over the Internet of late misses one critical factor: Logging everything that happens on a person's smartphone probably violates a variety of federal privacy and data protection regulations. If your Android phone is collecting the protected information that you send in e-mails, text messages or by other means, you could land in prison.