If you've detected Carrier IQ on your phone, there are a couple ways to remove it.

Carrier IQ has been dominating the headlines ever since 25-year-old security researcher Trevor Eckhart posted a paper online saying Carrier IQ was secretly gathering data about users' cell phone activity on the behalf of cell phone companies Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile. The company insists it's not malicious, but that hasn't stopped several parties from suing it for allegedly violating federal wiretap laws.

Carrier IQ isn't on every phone - and you can check if it's on yours with a free app from Lookout or BitDefender - but if you have detected it and want to remove it there are a couple options:

1. The easiest is to purchase Eckhart’s own removal app from the Android Market ($0.99), called Logging TestApp Pro Key. You need to root your phone first. And beware: several reviewers have warned that even after you buy the app, you need to donate money before it works.

2. The other way is to flash your Android smartphone with a custom ROM that doesn't contain Carrier IQ. The most popular is CyanogenMod, which gives you an option to opt out of data logging.

"We at CyanogenMod would like everyone to know that if you are running our software, you are not running theirs," CM wrote in a blog post.

Check out a video demo below from 'AbrahamsTech' of how to do this.

As for iOS devices, you can really only block Carrier IQ. For those running iOS 5 and above, simply click into Settings/General/About/Diagnostics & Usage, and hit “Don’t Send.” If you're stuck on iOS 3 or 4, or have a jailbroken device, Chpwn’s instructions should do the trick.

Apple told my colleague Chloe Albanesius that it stopped supporting Carrier IQ on most of its devices with iOS 5 and will remove it from all products in a future software update—most likely an incremental one rather than a full update like iOS 6.

Although Carrier IQ says its software is intended to help its clients monitor network performance and it denies gathering any personal information from users like screen shots or the content of their text messages and emails, many people still loathe the idea of a company recording how they use their phones.