Nokia browser reveals your phone number!!!

Posted on July 17, 2006, 7:30 am, by Mayank Jain (makuchaku).

What I started as an experiment to know what all formats does my new Series 60 Browser (on Nokia E61) supports, turned out to be a shocking revel eation!

The Series 60 Browser sends across your phone number in the browser user-agent string, while none of the other browsers I tested did this (Services in Nokia handset & Opera Mini)

Screenshot0019

Screenshot0012
You can see my phone number there… (smudged!)

This is a screenshot from Opera Mini
Screenshot0013
I wonder what that IP is… probably something related to Opera mini’s server side processing?

…

Another interesting thing that came up during this is that Nokia’s inbuilt browser (the long-press-0 thing) is picking up things from Opera Mini.
1) It now supports small screen & normal screen rendering
2) Moving joystick left/right scrolls the screen
3) It too does preprocessing of the html page
Nokia browser agent key-value pairs

BTW, is it java based?
Nokia browser agent key-value pairs

Test your browser yourself at http://www.ericgiguere.com/tools/http-header-viewer.html
Here is a snipurl version http://snipurl.com/p1nz if you want to open from your mobie’s browser & dont like that typing :P

So next time you plan to flame/spam someone using your series 60 browser, he might *call* you back to take revenge!
hahahaha

I wonder if this was designed to be such… or is an un-noticed anomaly!
I definitely do not expect my browser to send out my number!

[update]
The URL revealed in x-wap-profile key is very interesting…
http://nds1.nds.nokia.com/uaprof/NE61-1r100.xml
…atleast it lists all the formats i wanted to know in the first place!

:-)
[/update]

[update-2]
http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?p=223065
[/update-2]

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  • http://wahjava.wordpress.com Ashish Shukla

    Sue Nokia ;-)

  • http://www.e-series.org Ed

    Hi Ashish,

    I tested this on my Nokia E61 and my phone number isn’t sent. I guess this must be carrier related. Here is my information:

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/e-series/

  • http://makuchaku.in makuchaku

    Ed, if this is so, it clearly means that there is a provision of sending the number across & i’m sure that this amounts to breach of privacy… atleast mine!

    There must be a documented article from Nokia stating that how is it happening… is it from the carrier side (they blocking/ignoring it) of a feature of the browser.

  • http://makuchaku.in makuchaku

    I’m a big Nokia fan & would love to see this fixed if its from their end.

  • http://www.mineblogging.com Alex

    I’ve just test mine too on Cingular and it doesn’t show my # either.

  • http://My-Symbian.com My-Symbian.com

    It’s NOT the browser. It’s the wireless Nokia gateway (hotspot) sending the network information and the phone number.

    See here:

    http://my-symbian.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27187

  • blesio

    Your phone number will be visible only when you use the wap access point, and it’s not the Nokia Browser which gives the number but the operator. Nokia Software/firmware isn’t aware of the sim cards phone number at all, it’s aware of it’s IMSI number but that’s a different story. To not send your number you will have to use the www access point not the wap one.

    best regards

    Blesio

  • http://makuchaku.in makuchaku

    But Blesio, How do you explain the screenshots from Opera Mini… :)

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