* Beware the security risks of wireless 411
Mobile phones are becoming as common a business tool as a pen or a business card. So just how important is it that your colleagues, customers, partners – and virtually anyone else – can access your mobile phone number? And at what potential risk?
These are among the issues circulating around the looming availability of the so-called “wireless 411” directory service, to be made collectively available in the first quarter of next year by the largest U.S. mobile network operators except Verizon Wireless (at least for now). Together, AllTel, Cingular Wireless, Nextel Communications, Sprint PCS and T-Mobile intend to soon begin offering an “opt-in-only” directory service. Soon, people will be able to get a subscriber’s mobile phone number so long as that subscriber has given permission for the number to be given out.
A company called Qsent was selected to aggregate the wireless listing information for all the carriers and to implement the service. The operators insist that by providing the right of subscribers to opt in or out of the service at any time and at no charge should protect all privacy issues. And they swear there will be no subscriber list, either electronic or printed, that any telemarketer can buy and use to hound you to the ends of the earth while you are trying to conduct business.
Sounds pretty reasonable, given that mobile phones are becoming the primary – and sometimes the only – phone for many consumers.
However, what the service doesn’t account for is the rising emergence of smartphones in the business environment, which are not only calling instruments but also corporate computing devices. Phone numbers, in effect, serve as IP addresses, in that someone with your phone number – say, a competitive adversary – can spam your device with short message service (SMS) messages or send you a mobile virus via an SMS message.
Enterprises should make sure that corporate subscribers opt out of the directory. When top-down purchasing decisions are made, this is relatively doable, as IT buyers can make a blanket request that all devices not be listed. However, when individual employees or business units purchase the devices – more the norm today – who’s in charge of requesting a listing gets murkier.
Last week, London global researcher TNS and TRUSTe, a nonprofit online privacy certification organization, said they had conducted a joint survey that revealed that more than half of mobile phone users (53%) are against a nationwide directory of wireless numbers. The survey, which reportedly polled 1,068 consumers, also indicated that 56% would opt-out of publishing their numbers.
TRUSTe said it supports a “true opt-in standard” for a wireless directory meaning, in part, no implied opt-in listings when people sign up for service. This isn’t the way the service is meant to work today, but it’s anyone’s guess what such services will eventually morph into.
