Written by Evan Schuman
June 10th, 2009

Excerpts from StorefrontBacktalk.com

"As retail IT execs start to experiment with—and actually deploy—mobile-commerce applications more, the realization that they have to rely on their new telecom partners to safeguard their experimental data is proving to be unnerving.

Recent incidents involving T-Mobile—where the carrier was forced to confirm some claims of a supposed cyberthief who said that he had hacked in and stolen databases, documents and scripts—don’t help.

As e-tailers have learned the hard way from E-Commerce, customers don’t care about tidy legal contracts assigning responsibility and quality-of-service obligations.

If they go to a Wal-Mart or a Home Depot site and they have a bad experience—whether it’s with uptime, a FedEx delivery hiccup, incorrect status reports, a video consumer comment that glitches or anything else that the retailer may or may not be directly handling—those customers are going to blame Wal-Mart or Home Depot and might take their business elsewhere.

If M-Commerce is on your plate, you need to get used to living by the carrier’s standards. The T-Mobile situation is much more than unsettling. It’s also baffling, with the public positions taken by both T-Mobile and the supposed intruder internally contradictory. (When a company seems to contradict itself in mid-statement, times are tough. When both entities in a conflict do it, welcome to telecom security discussions)" 


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