In a rather bizarre piece of news coming out of the United Arab Emirates, BlackBerry users there discovered that they were being spied on by Etisalat, their telecom provider. The provider sent an update to its BlackBerry users, claiming that the update would improve performance. The update was in fact, a piece of software that spied on the users. The provider has rightly been the subject of quite a lot of negative press. This type of activity isn’t appropriate in the UAE or anywhere else. We’d expect this from a rogue criminal, but this is from an established telco and a RIM partner. What were they thinking? And lest we think “it couldn’t happen here,” the patch was actually written by an American company called SS8, which creates surveillance solutions.

According to RIM, the update that was sent out by Etisalat was designed to send received messages back to a central server. And if that’s not enough, instead of improving performance, actually worsened it, made reception poor, and drained the battery. The patch sent by Etisalat could have allowed the telco to receive and read all emails and text messages sent from the BlackBerries with the updates. The company’s not talking, except to issue a statement calling it a “technical fault.” But about half of the provider’s customers are planning to drop their service after hearing the news.

This piece of news should make smartphone users everywhere aware of the fact that it could happen to them, regardless of their telecom provider, and regardless of where they live. A smartphone is really quite a lot more than a phone–it is increasingly almost a fully functioning computer. It can be programmed to do nasty things–and it can most definitely become vulnerable to the same threats as a standard laptop or desktop computer. Standard security precautions should apply. It’s an evolving threat that hasn’t been fully taken advantage of yet, but give it time.