Movistar and Orange have activated TrustPid in Spain, the token capable of identifying users of mobile operators during navigation to personalize your advertising. The discovery has been made by Broadband and comes shortly after Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom began testing this “super cookie” in Germany, which allows them to track users and sell the information to advertisers. In your case, there are no plans to extend it to Spain.
The commitment to “super cookies” is largely explained by the scenario faced by cookies. Some browsers, such as Safari, Brave or Firefox, already block them and Google Chrome has announced that it will do so starting next year. Faced with this horizon, the operators have decided to take advantage of the situation and test TrustPid, a technology that allows advertising networks to be maintained based on the personal interests of each user.
It basically handles assign a fixed IP to each user, track you and identify your preferences. All with the aim of developing commercial profiles that may later be of interest to advertisers. It does not reveal the exact identity, but it is a source of valuable browsing information and stores the data at the mobile Internet provider (ISP) level.
The key: the advertising business
In its privacy policy, TrusPid details that among the information it processes is the mobile phone number and the IP address. “They will be used by your network provider, for example Telefónica or Orange, to generate a pseudonymous network identifier based on which we generate your unique pseudonymous token (Truspid). The IP address will be considered traffic data, which is personal data processed during the provision of telecommunications services”, he specifies.
When analyzing the API code of TrustPid, in Broadband they found a list of servers with different companies that allows checking which operators participate in the initiative. In it appears “Telefónica Research and Development” for Movistar customers and another for Orange customers. In Xataka Móvil they have contacted both companies, but they have not yet made a statement.
If you are a Movistar and Orange user and you have TrustPid active, yes, you can deactivate it relatively easily. Web browser settings do not allow disabling or blocking and IP address hiding does not work either. To achieve this, you must revoke the consent directly through the data protection portal enabled for that purpose.
Examples of access with Movistar (left), Pepephone (center) and O2 (right).
How? First you will have to access the TrustPid website through the Movistar or Orange mobile data network —WiFi does not work— and press the “Verify me” button. In addition to allowing access, it will offer you the possibility to stop the service. If we try with the mobile networks of O2 or Simyo, with Movistar coverage in the first case and Orange in the second, it will allow us to access sometimes to stop the service, but frequently it will get stuck.
If we try it with a connection from Yoigo or PepePhone, from Grupo MásMóvil, it will tell us that “access failed” because the mobile connection provider is not part of TrustPid yet.
Via | Engadget Mobile
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism