Rogue employees at a major mobile operator in the UK have illegally sold millions of customer records to competitors, the Associated Press is reporting.

Authorities won’t name the carrier because an investigation is underway. (UPDATE 11/18: T-Mobile has identified itself as the carrier.)

The British government says fines for these crimes are no longer a deterrent because they’re dwarfed by the amount of money one can collect from selling customer data these days. In this case, “substantial amounts of money changed hands,” authorities say, in exchange for data including contract expiration dates, which allowed competitors to target subscribers whose contracts were about to end.

Consumers want a personal mobile content discovery process that goes beyond simple search, according to a Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) survey of US and UK consumers released today. If content was, foremost, easier to find, 63% indicated they would spend more time accessing or purchasing it. If it were also more personal, respondents indicated they would increase their time spent accessing content to more than an hour, as well as their monthly spending by $8.
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Ahead of an impending near-field communications (NFC) phone onslaught, companies are adding weight to the movement with NFC-enabled applications. This week alone, contactless payment-enabler Inside Contactless and mobile technology company Mobile Distillery teamed up to create a NFC mobile application development platform, and Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) venture touchatag announced a collaboration with payment provider Clear2Pay to create a mobile payment framework for mobile operators. more

Twitter’s always had a mixed story when it came to SMS, and overall the emergence of mobile apps have made Twitter-to-SMS posting a non-issue for many users.

But what about Twitter-to-MMS links? As services like Twitpic have emerged to let Twitter users attach photos to Twitter messages, they’ve been positioned more as competitors to already slow-to-take off MMS services than anything.

But European operator Orange is trying to change that, announcing a deal with Twitter to explicitly support SMS-to-Twitter updates, as well as enabling Twitter photo sharing via its MMS service.

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