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Australian telco Optus has been caught passing its customers' mobile phone numbers to third-party websites without the customers knowledge or consent. The practice, known as HTTP header enrichment, aims to streamline the process of direct billing for customers, but they're not happy. The discovery was made by a user on the telco forum Whirlpool, and Optus confirmed it: "Optus adds our customers' mobile number to the information in select circumstances where we have a commercial relationship with owners of particular websites."
I know this is done in other western countries and abused to run you-watched-porn-now-pay-us scams. There's rumors that the practice is used in Russia too.
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Australian Telco Caught Passing Users' Mobile Numbers to Websites Without Consent
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(Score: 5, Informative) by Popeidol on Thursday June 25 2015, @07:22AM
I'm an Optus customer. At my office we pay them about $10k/month and just signed on for another two years. I'll be sending our account manager to request they explain the practice, and ask them to disable it to avoid potentially violating the privacy of our employees without consent.
If they reply with anything interesting I'll post it here.
(note for those who aren't local: Optus is the 'middle ground' phone company here. between Telstra has the best network but higher prices, Vodafone has better pricing and customer service but not a great network. Optus sits in the middle for everything and gets a lot of their customers just by virtue of not being the other two)
(Score: 4, Funny) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday June 25 2015, @11:07AM
I'll be sending our account manager to request they explain the practice, and ask them to disable it to avoid potentially violating the privacy of our employees without consent.
That is astonishingly polite. I'd be sending them a polite request asking them to pull off their own cocks and jam them up their arses. Seems to me these shitbiscuits should be compensating you and begging forgiveness while you search for a new provider.