17 Oct Telcos May be Selling Customer Number and Location
In a blog post earlier this week, Philip Neustrom of Shotwell Labs said that he had found two websites – Payfone and Danal, that returned data which includes the user’s name, current location, and billing zip code when visited using a mobile data connection.
The practice is said to be similar to Verizon’s Unique Identifier Header (UIDH) which allows websites to purchase rights to see information such as location and billing data of Verizon customers. The FCC had already punished Verizon for this kind of customer tracking last year, but it appears that other companies are still freely gathering such the data without customer consent.
Rodger Desai of Payfone issued a clarification, assuring that they use a “very rigorous framework of security and data privacy consent”, and pointed out that even fraudsters can now easily get into legitimate mobile change events.
Source: TechCrunch
