Who’s Reading Your Cell’s Text Messages?

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Misplaced “Call Mom” messages aren’t likely to harm anyone, but by late 2004, the unsolicited SMS problem exploded, and took on a darker nature, as mobile data services started popping up all over to take advantage of a new generation of feature-rich mobile phones, Bubrouski said.

“I was getting people’s grades, order information from unknown retailers, personal messages with people’s credit card numbers [and] social security numbers,” he wrote.

Most of the messages were sent by individuals, but many arrived in volume from companies like eMbience Inc. of San Diego, Calif., which unwittingly sent reams of MapQuest Traffic data to Bubrouski’s phone.

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Messages from both the Princeton Review Service and Pill Phone were accidentally sent to Bubrouski’s phone because of a flaw in a sharing feature in the service that allows test results completed on the phone to automatically be forwarded in SMS or e-mail format to a third party such as a parent or tutor, he said.

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