The 3G Dating Agency’s Blog

The Huffintonpost reports on how a Toronto based customer of Rogers Wireless had details of her private life revealed when her operator (without her consent) consolidated her account (which was in her maiden name) with that of her husbands, leading to the situation in which he found calling details alluding to an extra marital affair.

In the lawsuit, mother of 2 Gabriella Nagy, is claiming $600,000 CAN from Rogers Wireless for the breach of contract and invasion of privacy that resulted from the exposure of her personal and private information (which led to her subsequent divorce and the loss of her job through stress).

“I want others to know what a big corporation has done. I trusted Rogers with my personal information. We had a contract — and agreement that put my life right in their hands“

This is the tip of a much bigger privacy/personal information problem that is looming for Appstores and Mobile Operators… attorney’s will be on the starting blocks for their next big easy pay day as mobile location services start reaching the mass market!

Despite a supposedly strict but poorly thought out content controls on it’s App Store, Apple’s disregard for proper age validation and content moderation has led to at least three separate criminal cases of Child Abuse arising from the use of an app sold through Apples highly profitable App Store.

Cult of Mac reports on the latest criminal case involving Moses Virgil Campbell, a 44-year-old man, who used the “iDate-Personals Dating Service for Singles of Any Sex” app on his iPhone to groom, arrange to meet and eventually rape a 14 year old girl. The case follows a case in Canada involving Grindr (an App that received a marketing push from Stephen Fry and Jeremy Clarkson on the BBC TV show Top Gear) and another as yet unidentified iPhone social networking app in Phoenix.

Despite efforts from these services to market themselves as nothing more than flirtatious “games” exclusively for the use of adults aged 18+ a Washington Examiner interview with Tom Reed the President of the App maker (Netway) exposes the incompetent approach the company has taken to preventing grooming of minors: “the company looks for underage users by scanning profiles for words like “teen”. They also claim to review every uploaded picture to screen out “users who look like they’re too young to join”. The pedophile circumvented this weak effort by using a fake image and then simply sending his phone number through the site to the child.

Ground Truth have released results of a survey showing that half of all time spent on the Mobile Internet in the USA is spent on Social Networking Sites and that users of “Mobile-Specific social networks” are more engaged than users of PC-based social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace, on mobile.

“While the popularity of mobile social networking is widely believed, this is the first time we have been able to truly quantify just how much the category is driving adoption of the Mobile Internet with actual usage metrics, the disparity of time spent between social networking and the next category, portals, which account for 59.83% and 13.65% of time spent respectively, is a vivid illustration of the impact social networking has on Mobile Internet traffic in a given week.”

Evan Neufeld, Vice President of Marketing, Ground Truth.