To much worry about porn and not enough about tracking
Nobody seems to worry that O2 being the provider is using a marketing company as its age verification. Each time you surf a site on O2, the name of the site and its age certification is taken and put through a filter. If your not registered and the age cert is over 18 your challanged. However what is not mentioned by O2 is if that data is then saved. So even if your registered this process still goes on in the back ground. Over time Bango are creating a huge map of how users use their mobile and how to address advertising. It allows for huge amounts of usage data to be saved. Now imagine that O2 does software modicfications prior to the user getting to the phone(they do, but I dont know to what - hence the need for ful disclosure) which allowed the browser to pass over the unique ID of the phone. You as an indivdual could theorectically be tracked by what your text messages say, what your voice data says and what your surfing habits are.
This is not a big brother type end of the world as we know it rant, but I feel that O2 have an obligation to its customers to give full disclosure of how data is saved, used and shared. Remember how BT where hauled over the fire for its Phorm technology? this is the same. Bango are now the official 'Age restriction' monitors for Vodaphone and 3.
PS if you use opera, then you can get past O2s proxy. It allows Opera to track you instead, but O2 dosnt get its hands on your data
Biting the hand that feeds IT
