O2 customers mobile numbers exposed to website owners due to technical issue

Mobile operator O2 said it has fixed the technical problem that led to disclosure of its customers’ mobile phone numbers to website owners while browsing the websites.

According to O2, it was normal that certain technical information of the device (such as mobile phone) that a customer uses, to be passed to website owners for optimising the user experience.

The ISP said it used to provide the user’s mobile number as part of this technical information, saying it is standard industry practice.

“We share mobile numbers with selected trusted partners for 3 reasons: 1) to manage age verification, which manages access to adult content, 2) to enable third party content partners to bill for premium content such as downloads or ring tones that the customer has purchased 3) to identify customers using O2 services, such as My O2 and Priority Moments.” the mobile broadband operator stated in its blog.

According to O2, the technical changes that it has made during the routine maintenance could have caused the technical issue. As a result, not only O2′s trusted partners but other websites could access customers’ mobile phone numbers between the 10th of January and Wednesday 25th of January.

The issue which was fixed on 25th January has affected only 3G and WAP data services, but not Wifi, O2 said.