This is fun :)

In my response to a post on ringtone purchasing, Shekhar has responded to my response, which bears yet another response, but this time I think I’ll address specific sections.

I am not sure how can the third party deliver an application or service without information about the platform from which the ring tone request was sent.
For the most part they don’t - they require you to identify your own handset. This does lead to situations where the content you buy may not display on your particular cellphone - but caveat emptor!

But I am bothered by cell phone company as “big brother” who own the medium, authentication technology, and the gateway to ecommerce over an unencrypted medium which makes them a very big owner of information on user physical identity, habit, social connections (guess phone usage given you a good idea).
This is less an issue where pay-as-you-go phones are popular. In the UK for example I can pick up a cheap cellphone for about US$40, and there’s absolutely no record of who I am, and nothing for the mobile carriers to colledct about me, except that I used the handset somewhere. There’s no way of linking the handset to me personally.

A contract handset is of course a different matter. And yes, the carriers do hold sway over the gateway - but it’s a pretty leaky gateway.

In case of iTunes, the Apple is not in a good position to collect this kind of data and the transactions can not be correlated while in case of Cellphone the company can become quickly very powerful and start selling user’s habits and social contact info (without providing their personal information) to ring tone providers to allow them to better customize the ads etc on per-user basis.
I actually think it’s the other way around, as in it’s current form iTunes collects all sorts of personally identifiable information about me before I can use the service: My name, my gender, my age, my address, my email address (or at least a valid, working address) and my credit card details. Without these details I can’t actually purchase anything from iTunes (unless they’ve changed it recently).

Conversely, with a cellphone, all the content provider is concerned about is ensuring I have enough credit on my cellphone account (or I have a contract handset) - other than that they don’t typically care.

And on the specific subject of ads, the market for cellphone advertising is a nascent one, and one that’s already being very heavily regulated. In the UK you’re not allowed to market directly to mobile phones unless the customer has opted in, and you must provide an opt-out service free of charge (the STOP function). Companies who flout this rule can be (and have been) heavily fined. This regulation in many ways is actually being driven by the carriers themselves. For example, Vodafone in the UK will not let any third party provider use their SMS delivery network without registration and confirmation that the STOP function is provided free of charge (there’s a whole raft of guidelines).

One thing that has been noted already is that unsolicited ads sent to mobile phones actually have a highly negative impact on the end user, making them less likely to buy another ringtone or graphic, and more likely to complain. On the flip side, opt-in advertising works extremely well…

I am sure the silos within the company itself may be keeping this information distributed but as the integration of these identity silos are completed over time think of the information they have access to (if the ecommerce through cellphone takes off).
Interestingly it’s possible to provide these kind of ecommerce services using cellphones as the billing mechanism without the intervention of the mobile providers at all. They don’t have to be the ecommerce provider at all - all they become is the transport network. There does not need to be a link between the cellphone account used to pay for an item, and any information about the item itself, and there doesn’t need to be a link between the purchase, the cellphone and the person. And this does include items specifically designed to be utilised by the cellphone itself. (In fact, the web code to provide a form of microbilling for ecommerce sites using cellphone charging is a trivial excerise.)

I’m sure the cellphone carriers could intercept and perhaps log what information is passed between a third party content provider and the mobile carrier, but that starts encroaching on privacy and wiretapping issues. For everything else, there’s no reason to associate the purchase with the item - sort of like you don’t write down on your bank notes what you bought with them :)

Technorati Tags: Identity, Digital Identity, Federation, Federated Identity, Transient Identity, Mobile, Cellphones, Ringtones, iTunes