Paris Hilton...

I'm so incredibly out of touch with the celeb world, that I'm probably at least 10 degrees apart from Paris Hilton, never mind 6. I don't know who she is, but she entered my world when my Google Alerts told me her phone had been hacked.

In itself, hacking Hilton's phone is not that interesting. Being totally non-PC in my assumptions about this talented actress, then I'd say she probably used a password like "hotel". Even if the hacker needed greater ingenuity, someone had already managed to hack the entire Sidekick userbase, making this hack a lot less impressive, at least technically.

However, what it highlights is the lack of proper infrastructure for protecting our data in the mobile world. I think that it's fair to say that address books are highly valued and private collections of information. Users deserve better protection of such assets.

The outstanding hack of the J2ME environment showed how "easy" it was for a rogue MIDlet to gain access to phone book data and call records etc.

In response to that not-so-little Java incongruity, played down by Sun, I posted that handset vendors should be considering encryption of key data as a standard design procedure. This would have defeated the original T-Mobile hacker from gaining access to all those Sidekick-user goodies, including, apparently, their photos and even - apparently - the records of a Secret Service agent (which I find totally incredulous).

Join my email list
Subscribe to my "100 Mobile Product Ideas" free e-book