I've read all about the Carrier IQ debacle and think that it's a really big mountain made out of a tiny molehill. Think about it, how many calls, how many text messages are sent to/from smart phones on a given day? Tens of millions or more. With that huge tsunami of data, is it realistic to believe that they're capturing the personally identifiable information and doing some sort of data mining?

Then again, I long ago accepted the dictum proposed by Bill Joy when he said "privacy is dead. get over it." so it's quite possible I err on the side of being too lenient and unconcerned about the privacy and security of my personal data.

However you view the diagnostic information that CarrierIQ captures on behalf of the different cellular carrier services, the good news is that Apple planned ahead and iOS 5 does indeed have the ability for you to disable sending diagnostic data from your iPhone.

It'll take you about 45 seconds to switch it off. Start by finding and tapping on the "Settings" icon:

Once in Settings, you'll want to find the "General" option and tap on it:

Here's where it's a bit non-intuitive. The "About" button actually gets you to some important settings and options. My expectation, seeing "About", is that it'd be just read-only information like firmware version, space used on the device, etc, but...

Now you'll need to scroll down until you find the "Diagnostics & Usage" option:

Tap on "Diagnostics & Usage" on your iPhone 4s (or any other iPhone) and you'll find the feature clearly listed:

Tap on "Don't Send" and, voila! You've just disabled the transmission of diagnostic information to AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, etc.

Is it important to do this? Well, according to Apple, they're going to disable this feature in the next update to iOS 5 so it might not be too critical. Then again, for 45 seconds work, why not disable it?