Big Brother is watching your mobile phone

Posted: November, 17 2007

Oh dear, in an accidental press release Actix, a well known software vendor has admitted that it can completely discover what a user is doing with their mobile phone.

MOBILE NETWORK software vendor, Actix, has accidentally admitted that its products can drill down right to the bottom of collated data to discover what users are doing with their mobile phones.

The software has been designed specifically to optimise radio networks. But in order to establish exactly what caused a network fault, the software needs to known precisely what’s being going on.

But although the vendor and other like it can watch your mobile handset, subscriber’s name of and the number of the handset won’t be known. An operator would have to match up information from its home location register (HLR) to do that.

Used by 9 out of Ten operators

Actix’ products have proved remarkably successful so far with very little marketing. New CEO, Alex Hawker, claims that his company’s software is already used by nine out of ten 3G network operators.

He hinted that the software could enable a traditional IT company – like IBM, enter the market for business automation in the cellular industry where the ones doing the network optimisation have always been traditional players like Ericsson.

Hawker has, of course, come from a very interesting background. He left Amdocs to join Actix, having previously done spells at HP, Cisco and Openwave