Broadband News

O2 accidentally shares customer phone numbers online

Thursday 26 January, 2012

By Duncan Heaney

Privacy breach blamed on a glitch during maintenance.

Mobile network O2 has been criticised for revealing customers’ phone numbers to website owners.

A technical error during routine maintenance meant that some users’ phone numbers were inadvertently disclosed to websites when browsing the net via 3G or WAP services. In a blog post, O2 apologised for the mistake and said that it has fixed the issue.

Sharing phone numbers with websites isn’t uncommon among mobile providers. Most companies, including O2, Vodafone and Everything Everywhere, which operates the Orange and T-Mobile networks, admit they share numbers with “trusted partners” where transactions take place - downloading ringtones for example.

However, when just browsing the web, your numbers should be protected, and O2’s maintenance glitch meant this wasn’t the case.

The problem was initially noticed by Lewis Peckover, a system administrator for a mobile gaming company. He spotted the flaw on Tuesday, and to prove it he set up an online computer program that let users see if their numbers were revealed.

Speaking to BBC News, Peckover said he plans to make a formal complaint to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) about O2. "I don't want sites to match up all my requests and potentially call me and talk to me about them," he said.

The ICO responded, saying: “When people visit a website via their mobile phone they would not expect their number to be made available to that website. We will now speak to O2 to remind them of their data breach notification obligations, and to better understand what has happened, before we decide how to proceed.”

O2 has announced that it is co-operating fully with the authority. It also revealed that it has contacted telecoms regulator Ofcom since the incident.