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Comment by foodstances | Hacker News Reader

In addition to both sites correctly showing my full name, phone number, mailing address, and e-mail address, (and the Danal site showing my T-mobile phone plan info) the Payfone site shows this ominous description:

https://i.imgur.com/WkPj5Gb.png

I've had someone tell me they visited a shopping site once and without giving the company any information, they got an e-mail from that company a day later. I told them it wasn't really possible (from just the browser's perspective) and that they must have been tracked through some 3rd party cookies.

Apparently that was false and it's totally possible for a site to use one of these APIs and instantly get your full name, phone number, e-mail address, and physical address just by looking up your IP, and then track you across "switching carriers, changing phone numbers, upgrading devices, and replacing lost devices". Scary shit.

View on HN

MEO does that in Portugal. With your phone you visit (probably) an ad on a website and you're automatically subscribed to some 3rd party service that charges 3€ a week from your mobile operator credit.

Then you call MEO to cancel the service and then you learn they're not refunding your money and that instead of this 1€ call you could have disabled the 3rd party services through their web login.

It's incredibly hostile, and there are more dirty tricks they use.

Yikes, a chargeback would have to hit your phone carrier directly.

Did you try calling your phone carrier? No way this is legal.

MEO is the phone carrier. They're the largest one in Portugal, previously called TMN. They're the ones I called.

I can't edit to make my post clearer. I'm also not their customer anymore.

Do you have any source for this that I could look at?

I've found some reddit threads (in Portuguese):

https://www.reddit.com/r/portugal/comments/4hj1l7/servico_de...

https://www.reddit.com/r/portugal/comments/4nchbc/subscrição...

This is not new. TMN/MEO subscription shit has been going on for more than 10 years, but before widespread mobile internet it looked more like a SMS fishing attempt to get you subscribed.

MEO is now a subsidiary of Altice, a French company.

I believe Altice bought Optimum/Cablevision earlier this year.

> I've had someone tell me they visited a shopping site once and without giving the company any information, they got an e-mail from that company a day later.

I had this once from a Cisco reseller in Glasgow. It looked like they done a reverse DNS lookup on our office IP, then a Whois on the domain and just spammed the crap out of me. They started calling a day or two later. When I told them how creepy and inappropriate it was, they actually seemed proud of the lead gen system they subscribed to.