Mobile internet? It ain't just for the iPhone

Usage logging?

As in "anonymised user W went to domain X for Y amount of time from device Z"?

Or more

"Mr Orlowski went to domain www.napster.com for 2 hours from an iPhone"?

Former, good, latter, pfht. Plus, to brazenly say "look, we're spying on you! Aren't we great!" Seems silly. Sometimes schtum is the best tactic.

You cant run no script on a phone yet

So you can run a script on a phone then?

Been doing that for years....

Used to be you could buy the snapdial software and usb cable at your local Best Buy stores here in the US, it's sole purpose was to use your cell phone as a wireless internet adapter, all you needed was a cell phone with a internet connection... only drawback is it dropped the connection every time someone called your cell... Tethering is nothing new...

I mind!!!

If your not on an unlimited data tariff, then all these ads are, albeit in a small way, eating into your (read MY) data allowance. Granted there's not that much you can do about it, but even less if you're not even aware that its happening in the first place.

Is that it?

Given 'The figures only cover networks that have deployed Novarra's software', then this is an absolute non-story, n'est pas?

But!

Or should that be BUTT!

In either case the telcos do not want tethering.

It may be what people want, it ain't what the telcos want.

Proff: how many telcos are falling over themselves in a rush to please tethering?

@Martin Lyne

I happen to be one of the better placed people in the UK to comment on how much mobile networks know about you, as mobile customer analytics happens to be my profession, and I have worked with operators closely.

The answer is much more the former (anonomyzed user X...) than the latter, pretty much across all networks. Most of them outsource their ad serving to companies like Double Click or 4th Screen, Amobee or JumpTap, and will not share your data with them except as a hashed or doubly hashed number as a user ID. And that data is very, very limited...age range (not age), gender, maybe a lifestyle or interest classification for ad targeting, depending upon network. No personal details such as where you live, etc. That's not to say they don't know more, and couldn't learn more - but in terms of mobile ad targeting, that is pretty much the limit in the current environment.

As for mobile networks knowing more than the internet companies, that is hardly the case - mobile doesn't have cookies, and as such state-dependent knowledge is harder to acquire and maintain. Nor is there yet much ecommerce on mobile, which can be a huge factor in building a personal profile on the wired internet. Mobile may be better at linking their billing data to you for profiling, but over 50% of the UK mobile market is on prepay SIMs with no bills. All in all, customer profiling for mobile is still quite a challenge, and much harder than on the wired internet.

Not to say that mobile won't catch up...real-time traffic analysis and sophisticated contextual analysis of web browsing are on the horizon for mobile. But not this month...

@Henry Wertz

You refer to a WAP Gateway, manufacturers of which are many.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAP_gateway.

WAP is so Y2K, BTW. Any decent new phone has a proper HTML (and JavaScript for that matter) aware browser without the need for intermediate processing on the operator side. I installed Opera Mini instead of using the default with-kitchen-sink browser mainly because it saves bandwidth.

This may not apply on contract phones if your operator dictates what you may run on it and how you use it. This of course is related to the article's point about operators screwing the customer. Competition is clearly not working in the consumer's favour.

O2...

There's something certainly going on at O2.

For example, if I browse to m.facebook.com, "O2 Home", "O2 Search", and "My 10" links appear at the bottom of the pages. I'm pretty sure they're not in the original data served by Facebook...