Here’s some disturbing piece of news or better yet, ab unconfirmed rumor. It looks like BlackBerry owners in the UAE have received a performance enhancement patch from Etisalat, their official carrier. Said patch is apparently something else! It’s a spyware that will ultimately give Etisalat access to its customers’ messages and maybe more. Well that’s not nice now, is it?

Like I said, there’s nothing official so far but Etisalat customers have noticed reduced performance and battery life in their phones which was weird considering that the patch should have improved the overall performance. According to Nigel Gourlay the patch originates from a surveillance company, the SS8, and it can be activated at any time Etisalat chooses to. Besides text messages, the spyware can also monitor emails. Fortunately this whole surveillance thing can’t be handled by Etisalat’s network just yet. It looks like a 100,000 BlackBerry phones trying to connect to the registration server for the phone caused the battery and performance failure and thus the potential spyware was discovered. If you own an Etisalat Berry you should get rid of that patch somehow as you definitely deserve your privacy. What will Etisalat have to say about all this?

via Register