Picture message service suspended after privacy concerns

O2 has suspended its web-based picture message (MMS) viewing service after photos sent privately to others were found online.

The problem, discovered by anti-spam blog Mail Channels, has affected users of handsets that can't display picture messages, such as Apple's iPhone.

Rather than seeing the message, users of these handsets receive a text message with a link to a web-based viewer. However, as no username or password is required to view the message, Mail Channels found that some images could be viewed through a simple Google search.

According to Mail Channels, the images were displayed with the sender's phone number.

David Cawley, a representative for the blog, said: “As these web pages were wide open to the internet, not requiring any authentication, a very small handful were indexed by Google.”

O2 has suspended the website viewing service. A representative for the network provider told us: "We have temporarily taken down our MMS web-based viewing service while we investigate this issue fully.”

He added that users with MMS-enabled handsets were not affected by the issue.

See also:

EU to clamp down on websites offering mobile phone services

EU investigation finds eight in 10 websites are breaking the law  17 Jul 2008

Use Google's filtering options to find websites

  03 Jul 2008

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