The ticket prices may be outrageous, but when it comes to business intelligence you can't beat first class rail travel.
The other day, returning to London from a meeting in the north-east, I sat next to two well-suited gentlemen discussing the investment policy of a fund of which they were evidently trustees. Which fund, they were careful not to reveal – until one of them answered a phone call with his name.
After a few minutes' work on www.192.com and Google, I knew the traveller's full name, date of birth, address, the names of his wife and grown-up children, how much he had paid for his home and the size of his (substantial) remuneration from various directorships. The annual report of a well-known organisation helpfully provided a photo to help me confirm I had the right bloke.
By the end of the journey, I had a very good idea which pension fund he was talking about, and where some eight-figure sums of money would shortly be going.
Apart from touching the gent for a loan, I'm not sure what use I could have made of this information. Nonetheless I'm sure that someone canny or unscrupulous enough could apply it to my fellow traveller's disadvantage, so I've omitted the details here. I tell the story to illustrate the level of personal information already available online about any individual with any public profile at all. Once directory sites start collating material from social networks and newspaper databases – watch this space – there will be more.
Against this background, I find the decision to publish the first directory of mobile telephone numbers distinctly unworrying. The majority of phone numbers have never been secret, and thanks to technology – voicemail and caller ID – we're now more protected than ever against unwanted attention. People who really need to protect their mobile numbers can change them by the simple step of buying a new phone – either an anonymous pay-as-you-go or a contract in the name of a friend named Smith or Patel.
True, I can see little legitimate social use for a mobile phone directory. Thanks to technology again, our phones automatically generate directories of our personal social communities. Likewise, I predict that the commercial market will be limited. Junk sales calls are a menace, of course, and no doubt there will be a temporary blip in these while sleazy enterprises check out the market. No doubt anyone who has ever given out a mobile number in a sales context will be assumed to have "consented" to such calls. But surely the correct response is what we already do with such calls at home – or ask them to hold for a minute while we find a pencil and then leave the phone off the hook.
What the mobile directory service will do is prompt individuals to take a hard look at what personal data about themselves is up for grabs on the web. While I generally find myself in the "more the better" camp (I'd like to see motor vehicle registrations and individual tax returns publicly posted, for a start), even I have limits – my daughter's mobile number, for example.
The important thing is that we're aware of what information is up there. I'm pretty sure that a certain gentleman travelling first class from York to London on 3 June wasn't.
