O2 UK has blamed a technical change for inadvertently making customers’ mobile phone numbers available to website owners.

The issue was reported yesterday by web systems administrator Lewis Peckover, who demonstrated the problem online.

The number of mobile banking users worldwide will reach 530 million by 2013, up from just over 300 million last year, according to a new report from Juniper Research.

It says mobile services are becoming a fundamental component of banks’ business strategies as they respond to the current economic climate.

James Rosewell writes:

This year’s CES event in Las Vegas promises to be the biggest yet. There’ll be mobile phones, there’ll be tablets, there’ll be gaming devices, there’ll be sat nav – and there’ll be many other products that now include their own mobile data connection.

When you’ve got mobile data, it’s usually an obvious step to add a browser... and before you know it, consumers are browsing the internet from a device that was never really intended to visit conventional web sites.

The number of active users who access Facebook every month via a mobile application has just passed 300 million, according to Benedict Evans from research company Enders Analysis.

He notes that Facebook announced 350 million mobile users in total a few months ago, from an overall total of 800 million users.

The latest research from Strategy Analytics predicts that sales of mobile phones able to handle HTML5 - the latest version of the language used to construct web sites - will grow by 365% between 2011 and 2016.

In fact, worldwide HTML5 phone sales are expected to increase from 336 million units this year to 1 billion units in 2013.