Oh, it’s all going off in the UK at the moment, with the news that thousands of UK subs on the T-Mobile network have unknowingly had their data sold on to third parties, for what is apparently substantial sums of money!
For those that don’t live in the UK, we tend to take our data privacy quite seriously indeed – there are plenty of laws that are designed to protect – but what do you do when people on the inside are harvesting your details and selling them on to middlemen? The goal of selling on the data was to allow other companies to call these people before their contracts finished, and move them on to other deals.
Unfortunately the punishment for these offences are purely financial – which is why some are calling for a prison sentence to be introduced. Certainly a fine isn’t going to stop organised criminals from going about their ‘business’.
I do feel sorry for those people that have had their records misappropriated, because they are now the source of multiple calls today from various third parties (since the data has been shared around) apparently – quite apart from the fact that sensitive personal data that could be used to fraud them, is out there on the InterWeb.
Hopefully T-Mobile can get things back on track really quickly, and minimise the problems for people who are currently suffering. I’d think that perhaps decent gestures of goodwill would go a long way to helping, but that’s just me with my consumer hat on 🙂