Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Friday 6/10/2006

And finally, let us go into the weekend celebrating the fall of one little fortress of foolishness, the T-Mobile ban on instant messaging and voice over IP (VoIP). Admittedly you have to pay extra for VoIP, but anyone can use IM. Just as well, as T-Mobile has been shipping MS Messenger on its Windows Mobile smartphones for a while: it's one thing to have an unreasonable ban on a service, quite another to then implicitly promote its use.

Even as one nonsensical nut disappears down the gullet of the squirrel of sanity, you can rely on the mobile operators to redress the balance by creating even more madness. From Informa's Week in Wireless email comes the following scary report:

"O2 [has] changed its terms of service to let itself share 'the date, duration, time and cost of such communications and the location of your mobile phone' with…. whoever the hell it likes, but specifically 'other telecommunications providers, credit companies and debt collectors'."

This is fear-inducing stuff indeed. I, and I imagine most people, know that the mobile phone operators know full well where we are at any time. Sometimes, they can even make the numbers add up to work out how much we owe them. But the idea that they would share this information with anyone not bearing a court warrant is unthinkable. In particular, some of the more muscular debt collectors are certainly capable of putting more of an emphasis on frightening the punters than they do on checking the validity of the debt they're chasing, and the ability to track people down by their mobile phones opens up a whole new area of aggravated stalking opportunities.

It strikes me that this sort of unilateral change of conditions of service goes beyond anything that can be considered reasonable. Not being an O2 customer — and by jove, highly unlikely to become one at this rate — I don't have the opportunity of telling them that I do not accept that change and if they want to impose it I'll be off now, thanks very much. You may be a customer. You might like to ask them what they're up to, and to stop it now.

That's if you don't want your location to be revealed to anyone O2 feels can benefit from the information. Perhaps you're feeling a bit lonely and fancy the company. But if you do give it a go, let me know: I'd like to think that this is the sort of barminess that can be rolled back if enough people make the right sort of noise.

Otherwise, they'll all be at it. And that's not a game I want to play.