The latest update to all this:
Carrier IQ takeaway: You don't control your phone - Dec. 28, 2011
I found this part of the article to be somewhat interesting however:
Carrier IQ and a security consultant, Dan Rosenberg of Virtual Security Research, determined that HTC had turned on a debug logger that should have been left off by default. As a result, the Carrier IQ app was temporarily storing everything a user did on the phone. The software maker said it is working with HTC to fix the issue.