O2 has now posted on its blog, its own description of the problem that occurred today. It describes it pretty much as a misconfiguration that allowed a provision for ‘selected partners’ to receive the client’s phone number in the headers of the HTTP request to spread to be applicable to all sites.
Although seemingly a reasonable explanation, it is the first time that I have heard that O2 would be using this with ANYONE. Almost certainly I will find the clause buried down in my terms of use somewhere (still looking), but this is a shoddy and appalling lack of privacy and control around something that a few people (not me but I still don’t want to share it with web sites unless I choose to) keep VERY private. To not be expressly clear to the user or to provide a mechanism for blocking it is bad. I am reminded of an old Internet Explorer feature that had to be disabled very quickly in the 1990s whereby the browser would present the username of the logged in PC user to every website. The feature was useful in authenticating in a corporate environment but unfortunately they allowed presentation to every site – a horrible privacy AND security issue. The disabling came in to the user control through Security Zones but it was by default turned OFF. This is something that should be the case here.
We shall have to see how this issue progresses. Certainly I am thinking twice about having O2 as a service provider. I will also be more careful about my use of SIM cards from providers I am new to in the future, after all they could similarly do this.
. It also had the unfortunate problem that the battery had exposed connections that were too easy to short, as I found out when my metal staff pass loop managed to cause a little warming in my inside pocket one day.