Can a mobile website find out my phone number from me visiting?
Dear Aunt Enna,
I have a brand new Sony Ericsson k800i. My problem is that I don’t want to use the web on my phone outside of my operator’s portal, because I’m worried the websites will take my phone number when I visit and send me spam messages afterwards.
Do I need to worry about what websites I look at or what they can do to my phone?
A paranoid mobile newbie
Dear Paranoid,
A website can only find out a few basic pieces of information, but at no point are they given access to your phone number.
They’ll find out your user agent, which is a long line of garble that helps them display the page correctly for your needs. They can also generally find out your country and operator. They are not interested in your phone number or the colour of your underpants.
Now, please take the tin foil hat off your head and go have some fun on your phone! Do yourself a favour and sort yourself out with some more interesting sites. How about Facebook, Wapedia for a mini’fied version of Wikipedia or Engadget, for a start?
Love & teacakes,
Aunt Enna
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September 7th, 2007 at 12:46 am
Vero,
If this Enna was invented as a vehicle for a “satirical” post about the technical ignorance of the blue-rinse brigade then I apologise. On the other hand, if this blog entry was supposed to be honestly informative then a correction is in order: in the UK it’s quite simple to get a website-visitor’s phone number - it costs ~5p a lookup via an aggregator with the right privileges. Try giving Dialogue a call, for instance.
Sort it out!
September 10th, 2007 at 10:11 am
Thanks for your comment Grant. Absolutely true that there is a way for a website to acquire your details through services like Dialogue or Bango - I should have mentioned them.
At 5p a pop, it isn’t financially viable for most website owners to use this kind of lookup service. They are also a fringe case and in the vast majority of cases, websites will ask users to enter their details and only contact users who have given their outright permission.
As for Enna, she’s here to represent the masses, the 95% of us who like mobiles but are still slightly bewildered by them. She could just as well be a 14 y/o teen or a 45 y/o businessman, but we thought the blue rinse was far more fetching than a big mustache!