Since the discovery and public announcement that Carrier IQ Software was secretly installed and gathering data from tens of millions of mobile handset users, Sprint has decided to disable using the software.
I applaud Sprint for making the decision to stop using the Carrier IQ software. This does not mean that the software has been removed from your phone and disabled, on the contrary it is still alive and well on your favorite handset and collecting data at this moment. Sprint just decided to stop accessing the data.
It is not yet clear if the software can be completely removed or disabled from handsets without causing other issues with the phones. Rooting the phone seems to be one way to disable the data collection and cripple the Carrier IQ software but not completely remove it in all cases. This is due to the fact that the Carrier IQ software can be installed using various manners during the phones production.
We can only hope that the phone vendors and wireless carriers decide to phase this out of future handsets and patch existing handsets and operating systems to remove the pesky, privacy invading software.