Windows Mobile Editor Anthony Newman suffers from a bout of paranoia, and wonders just what our mobile networks will do next.
One recent announcement by Vodafone - that they'll be introducing their own content control policy this month - has set me thinking about the power that our mobile networks now have over us.
For almost all of us, our mobile phone has become beyond indispensable: we cannot even conceive of no longer having one, and we continually use them for an ever-increasing range of services. These initially included voice calls, then text messaging, then picture messaging and video services, but also the parallel development of data services over CSD, HSCSD, GPRS and 3G.
The increasing dependence on these services gives more and more power to the huge companies that provide them, and I'm starting to worry that they may be abusing this power. The main worry for most people operating under an effective monopoly is money, obviously, and it's a good thing that (at least in the UK) service charges aren't increasing, although hidden charges are creeping in.
A far more insidious problem is that of privacy or censorship - the Big Brother effect (and not the reality TV variety, either). The carriers are in a unique position to control the data travelling across their networks, and have a quite frightening power to do what they like without the user really being any the wiser.
The recent announcement from Vodafone basically says that whatever they deem to be 'non-universal' content will be blocked by default. This is based on an algorithm, and any mistakes made by this must be manually rectified by a team at the network. If a commercial site is wrongly blocked, then the user cannot access it. This is inconvenient, but we don't see the network apologizing, because it's for our protection. They don't apologize to the siteholder, either, despite the potential loss of earnings when, say, ringtones are blocked because the algorithm can't read them. At least Vodafone will let the user know when their text message has been rejected, and users can opt-out, but this needn't be the case.
This service is very similar to, and possibly based on ACCESS, reported last month. The worrying thing is that it doesn't take much to leap from monitoring web and WAP sites to monitoring text messages for key words and filtering them out without informing the sender or recipient. In a world of terrorism, the justification for this will be public protection. But at what point does this protection become an infringement of privacy?
The UK at least has a variety of codes of conduct, but the law - and public awareness of it - is a mess. We need to ask whether our mobile carriers really should have the right to watch what we do.
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