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Ofcom helps protect customers against unexpected roaming charges

Ofcom helps protect customers against unexpected roaming charges

UK service providers must notify customers when they connect to a different network

New rules from UK telecoms regulator Ofcom will protect customers when they use their mobile phone on a foreign network. In addition, customers will be alerted if they are inadvertently roaming, perhaps because they're near an international border.
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Global smartphone market is set for recovery, says new forecast

A new forecast from research specialists Canalys shows the smartphone market is set to recover next year. Worldwide shipments declined by 12% last year but that decline is expected to slow to 5% this year.
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Vodafone and Three plan to merge their UK businesses

Vodafone and Three plan to merge their UK businesses

New Hutchison/Vodafone network would be biggest UK operator

Vodafone Group plc and CK Hutchison Group Telecom Holdings Limited have agreed to combine their UK telecommunication businesses, respectively Vodafone UK and Three UK. The merger will create a large new network operator to compete with Virgin Media O2 and EE.
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UK mobile payment service Paym to close in March 2023

UK mobile payment service Paym will close on 7th March 2023. The service, which allowed users to make and receive payments using their mobile phone numbers, was launched in 2014.
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Qualcomm legal action moves forward in the UK

Qualcomm legal action moves forward in the UK

Which? seeks payout for Samsung and Apple smartphone owners

Consumer protection organisation Which? has been given permission by the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal to represent Apple and Samsung smartphone buyers in a legal case against chip manufacturer Qualcomm.
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Opinion Articles

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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Tags: security opinion internet

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