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As O2 customers are getting riled up over news that the U.K. network has been sharing your mobile number with Web sites you visit from your phone, a security expert reckons networks leaking your information is nothing new.
Sophos’ Graham Cluley cites a paper presented in 2010 by Berlin student Collin Mulliner entitled “Privacy Leaks in Mobile Phone Internet Access.”
Mulliner set up a test page you can visit to see what — if any — information your phone is betraying. We tried the page using one of the O2 SIMs we tested earlier today, and our phone number popped up yet again. Oh dear.
Meanwhile, O2 is tweeting at disgruntled customers, telling them it’s “investigating” the issue and that it’s a “top priority.”
Update 12:39 p.m. PT: O2 claims to have fixed the issue — and indeed, two O2 phones we’ve tested are no longer displaying their numbers on the test site. Read more about O2’s response here.
Read more of “O2 leak should have been fixed years ago: security expert” at Crave UK.
See also: ZDNet UK: Privacy watchdog to probe O2 over phone number leaks
