The Fonecast produces regular podcasts for the UK mobile phone industry. Its news review runs for approximately 30 minutes and is free to download. Separate in-depth features are also created regularly throughout the year. A number of advertising and promotional opportunities are available on the podcasts and also on the website. Please download the media pack (pdf) or listen to one of our podcasts to learn more.

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Iain Graham

Iain Graham is the voice of The Fonecast. He’s a veteran of the mobile industry, having held senior positions with One2One (now T-Mobile) and Vodafone since the 1980s. Iain left his role as Vodafone’s Head of Indirect Business in 2005 to become a consultant and professional toastmaster. His sense of humour and no-nonsense attitude makes him the perfect person to host each edition of The Fonecast… and to work with your company.

James Rosewell

James Rosewell is the technical wizard who built The Fonecast web site and created his own easy-to-use podcast software. He started his career at the sharp end of technology, as a key member of a small team in a high-growth software start-up. James then spent 10 years with Vodafone, where he established a technology account management function that brought control to a £25m programme. He led the team of 100 people that replaced Vodafone’s Retail IT platform and grew service provision IT systems in line with Vodafone’s exponential expansion during the late 1990s. James passionately believes in the benefits mobile applications provide and is currently bringing those benefits to web developers through the open source project 51Degrees.

Mark Bridge

Mark Bridge is writer and podcast producer for The Fonecast. The rest of the time he’s a freelance writer who’s focussed on the mobile phone and IT industries. Mark has over 15 years’ experience working with fixed-line and mobile communications, beginning his career as a telephone engineer before finding sanctuary within the warmth of an office. As well as copywriting and consulting, he also turns up occasionally as the ‘gadget expert’ or 'mobile phone expert' on radio and TV. He’s committed to making technology easier to understand – through his writing, in his broadcasting and through his contribution to The Fonecast.

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Tuesday, March 30, 2010

The mobile web and your personal information

James Rosewell writes:

The mobile techie community has known about mobile networks and indeed some handsets providing unique information about mobile devices and customers for a long time. Collin Mulliner, a graduate student at the Technische Universitat Berlin, has recently bought the issue to the attention of the public during a talk at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver.

Information such as IMEI and Mobile Phone Number is passed to web servers accessed by a mobile device or Mobile Network Operator (MNO) proxy server in hidden fields called HTTP Headers. The amount of information, format and ultimately usability of the information varies between MNO and mobile device. Practically, the inconsistency of the information makes it of little practical use to web sites. The apparent random nature of the information provided indicates MNOs haven’t really thought through how they’re configuring their gateways and proxies.

The following table shows the HTTP Header (hidden fields) provided by a mobile request received at thefonecast.com yesterday. Notice the x-up-calling-line-id field that contains the mobile number of the requesting device. (We've removed the mobile number from this example). This particular request was provided via the ZXWAP Gateway from ZTE.

 

Header Field
Value
Connection
Keep-Alive
Via
ZXWAP GateWay,ZTE Technologies
Accept
text/html,text/css,multipart/mixed,application/java-archive, application/java, application/x-java-archive, text/vnd.sun.j2me.app-descriptor, application/vnd.oma.drm.message, application/vnd.oma.drm.content, application/vnd.oma.dd+xml, application/vnd.oma.drm.rights+xml, application/vnd.oma.drm.rights+wbxml, application/x-nokia-widget, */*
Accept-Charset
iso-8859-1, utf-8; q=0.7, *; q=0.7
 
Accept-Encoding
gzip, deflate, x-gzip, identity; q=0.9
 
Accept-Language
en;q=1.0,id;q=0.5,vi;q=0.5
Host
wap.socmobi.com
User-Agent
Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.2; U; Series60/3.1 Samsung/SGH-i450/DBGL3 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 ) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413
x-up-calling-line-id
XXXXXXXXXX

The real point is that MNOs are seen to be taking liberties with customers personal information. There are many practical uses to providing this personal information “behind the scenes”. For example:

·    A web site that requests a telephone number can default the telephone number field to the mobile number provided by the mobile network reducing the amount of data the user needs to enter.

·    Multiple interactions can be related to one another without requiring explicit authentication.

On a darker note, once a malicious web site has a mobile number, the text message inbox would become the next target for spam.

Many people will be unhappy with this personal information being provided without consent. MNOs need to establish a clear and consistent policy around the dissemination of such information and ensure customers are in control of the personal information their mobile phone is giving out.

 

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Author: The Fonecast
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Categories: Networks and operators, OpinionNumber of views: 8060

Tags: security opinion internet

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