Unwired -- Take My Number, Please

EZweb sends a unique handset ID number with every page request, and that number is the requesting cell phone's number, in plain text. A careful read of the "EZMyPageAccess B User" page under "Other Settings. SubscriberID" reveals the phone number, but few users understand the technobabble, and even fewer realize the phone number is being sent every time they request a page.

This is probably against some law somewhere. Several wireless content developers have brought the issue up with IDO, and it's obvious the company is freaked about potential problems, especially since it now claims 1 million EZweb handsets (no one believes there's a million people out there using EZweb, but that's another story). It's probably such an integral part of the EZweb infrastructure, however, that it won't be trivial to fix. And IDO admitted there's nothing to be done about it with existing phones.

In comparison, i-mode only passes a unique handset id number to "official" sites (those DoCoMo-approved and listed on the i-mode gateway menu), and even then the ID is not the phone number. Furthermore, to protect privacy i-mode users can change their email addresses to anything they choose, and most users do so.

A cursory check shows the general public to be unaware of the IDO situation, but it's not hard to imagine this ballooning into a major privacy issue.