Leaving Facebook - Never ever give your ID to FB!

CNN published an issue  in Facebook today... where FB users are most likely billed high on their mobile data due to autoplay settings in FB. Now I turned off autoplay on FB but then FB suddenly logged me out and starts to ask to upload my ID... Something I will never do in social media considering that they already know a of things about you, why would you give FB your ID.

Giving your ID to FB allows them to control everything about you,  from your permissions to bank account to government records and can be used by hackers to have access to everything about you and everything you own...

So if FB ask for your ID, you have been warned!

Are you paying for too much mobile data usage?

While reading news on the web, I noticed that CNN published an article regarding additional cost mobile users get when using too much data. The CNN Article can be found here. What surprised me was that AT&T  only has overage (when too much serviced is used) for data usage. This is surprising especially that AT&T have been using Carrier IQ in almost all if not all of its customer devices. I would assume that having an embedded CEM device agent makes this alerts easy to implement, not only that its very easy to implement (at least in the Customer IQ platform) but at least subscribers can have their own alerts.

Further to that subscription or usage charges should be visible to to every mobile subscribers either post-paid or pre-paid. At least with pre-paid subscribers they won't incur the cost. On my Telenor subscription I get notification only while roaming, it would be good to have the same find of overage notifications while I am not roaming at least it helps me control my phone bill amounts.

Thinking about it it should be easy enough to write an application that notifies mobile users when their potential cost of either roaming, data usage or simply phone calls are exceeding a particular limit. Now I wonder if INQUSO have that kind of policy control....

What your mobile operator and service provider do not want you to know?

A few days ago CNN published an article on its technology section about what mobile operators and cellular service providers do not want their customers to know. It centers on an application from carrier compare showing a comparison of various service providers/operators. The application is crowd-sourced and cost $1.99, a big amount of money for such an app compared to some really good mobile games costing less than a dollar. The CNN article on comparing networks can be found here.

Being curious and having little knowledge about such applications, I can't seem to understand that the hoopla is all about and why CNN put such worthless coverage on its news feed. Come to think of it similar applications have been available since 2009 and they are far better showing coverage and performance of competing mobile networks; better yet they are free. Well of course carrier compare is free if you don't mind the advertisements.

As a mobile user will you pay 2 of your precious dollars to know how the operator you did not subscribe to performs on a specific area? I am not so sure, but as one of my American colleagues explained to me in America, people will pay for such app. Now that got me thinking why don't we push our Customer Experience Management app in America for subscriber to pay a dollar :-) but then it will contradict on what we believe in that such application should be free of charge to the user and free from advertisements... Maybe one day I will bite the bullet and will do so, but that is not today.

On another point how will operators and service providers react, will they push more of Carrier IQ applications hidden to the user to know that their subscribers are checking out the competition? I believe in 2 things... (1)subscriber has the right to know (2)subscriber has the right to the best service possible. Having said that the network operator or service provider must provide the level of service they guarantee their customers will have, and at the same time keep their subscribers informed. This can be achieved with  CEM applications that are native to a smart phone, has opt-in and opt-out capabilities and has value to the user such as customer self care or information about the services they are receiving.