PB Mobile

How many PBers use default voice-mail settings?

The thing I find amazing about the whole telephone-tapping saga, back in the news today with the commons committee hearing, is that it’s so low-tech and so easy for anybody to do.

Everything is based on the fact the most mobile users don’t bother to set their own voice-mail pass-word when they get a new phone which means that the default settings – hardly complex combinations like 1, 2, 3, 4 or 0, 0, 0, 0 – are used. The defaults are different with each network.

Where the system is vulnerable is that you don’t need to be using the phone to access the voice-mail. So how vulnerable are you. I thought it might be useful to canvas opinion on the site. What do you do?

I remember reading the first reports of the NOTW case and my first reaction was to re-set my mobile password. But since then I must have got through two or three different phones and I’ve certainly not carried forward the practice. I was open as anybody.

So what do others do? I thought a quick poll might be interesting.

Before the Guardian’s revelations on phone-tapping did you as a matter of course always re-set the voice-mail PIN when you got a new mobile?
	Always
	Sometimes
	Never

Mike Smithson