MegaFon Moscow: Privacy & Advertising

Funny thing happened today. My car insurance expired, so I called my insurance company (RESO) from my cellphone. Nobody answered my call, it was Friday evening after all, so I hung up and decided to call them on Monday.

A few hours later, I received a text-message:

megafon-moscow-advertising

For those of you who can’t read Russian, it’s an advert from INHELP, a different insurance company offering its services. The message came from PROMO — the official MegaFon advertising channel.

At first I thought it was a coincidence, so I asked my wife to dial the same number and moments later she gets the exact same text advert!

I wouldn’t consider this a big deal if I had registered on some website online and given them my phone number. I would actually expect them to sell the number to third-party advertisers, but this is different.

Here’s what I think: MegaFon Moscow, one of the three largest network operators in Russia, is not only selling my phone number to advertisers, but also the fact that a phone call was made to a certain number. At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if a recording of the phone call was also handed over.

Talk about privacy.

About the author

Konstantin Kovshenin

WordPress Core Contributor, ex-Automattician, public speaker and consultant, enjoying life in Moscow. I blog about tech, WordPress and DevOps.

2 comments

  • My understanding is that GSM security is utter crap, so perhaps they may be just scanning for all calls to a specific number, then decrypting your phone number and sending you a response accordingly.

    I’m not sure how viable that is, but you can pull that data out if you need to apparently.