Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrabone | Hacker News Reader

It is. They will collect your personal information, and make it available to their parent (Telefonica, via O2) and one of the other subsidiaries set up specifically to do this, and then re-sell it to the highest bidder. See http://www.fastcompany.com/3002010/telefonica-sell-customer-... for example.

If you then subsequently leave them for another network, you will get more SMS spam than you can possibly imagine.

http://zingongle.wordpress.com/2012/08/22/o2-selling-my-deta... for more details.

View on HN

This is about O2 so it's not specific to GiffGaff, it happens to O2 customers who also pay much more for service than on GiffGaff.

Hence it doesn't really address the "too good to be true" comment about GiffGaff in the GP.

It's actually about Telefonica SA and everything they own, downwards. They're all considered harmful in my book.

Sure, and I was pointing out that this isn't relevant to GiffGaff's lower pricing. You were responding to a comment about GiffGaff being too good to be true but it's not 'cheap service in exchange for data-harvesting' as your previous comment could be read.

Interesting. Thankfully I signed up with one of my disposable gmail accounts. Another problem with giffgaff/O2 is that they compress and artefact every video or large picture one tries to send over their network. They claim its to save you money/bandwidth/data , which is funny as I'm on an unlimited account.

Note I said SMS spam (whereas the linked article talks about email as well). I assert that if you port your number out of a mobile provider owned by Telefonica SA, you'll find every PPI ambulance chaser in the country suddenly has that number regardless of your TPS preferences.

All the mobile providers crunch images. T Mobile attempt it for all images. It's frustrating when HN page load is delayed because their stupid proxies are struggling to serve the tiny voting button gifs.

I mentioned before the weirdly broken system they use for this too - 1.2.3.9; 1.2.3.11; etc are all annoying IPs to use.

I too am on an "unlimited" account. Unlimited being the normal definition of "has limits" - they'll insert interstitial warnings about fair use limits and they'll stop flash working.

Interestingly, O2 seem to compress CSS as well. Had a client with a problem on a mobile site I just could not reproduce. Turns out it only happened when connected to O2s data network.

Awful.

T Mobile insert <script src="http://1.2.3.8/bmi-int-js/bmi.js language="javascript"></script> after the opening <html> on every page. Pretty lousy behaviour.

Well they are amazing though, so I see no reason at all to leave them. Simply nobody else in the UK offers a deal as good as theirs.

They're a no-tether operator aren't they?

I don't often tether but I do like the ability to do it.

To quote amirmc:

"Tethering is permitted on £10 goodybag and will work on all smartphones with an inbuilt tethering feature, except for the iPhone." [1].

Not sure what the deal is with iPhone (I'm on their £12 option). All the other plans expressly say "Tethering is not permitted ..."

[1] http://giffgaff.com/goodybags/10pound-goodybag

You can tether even with their 12 pound unlimited package. I had to do it a few times, it was only for half an hour or so,but nothing happened. People on their forums are saying,that it's basically a rule of thumb - if it's occasional and you are not downloading hundreds of MB of data, it's going to be fine. But start using your phone to torrent stuff,and they will probably limit your speed or cut you off.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com