Since I started working in Sweden I installed WorldMate to use its currency converter. The basic features are free and I used mainly the weather forecasts and currency converter. However I noticed that after installing WorldMate, one application was using my internet connection without asking me first or showing any pop-up when connecting…. So, I started changing all access points in each application to anything but my default access point just to identify the culprit… Well, it ended up being a waste of time because something was still using this access point when none of my applications was supposed to… So, I started uninstalling each application one by one and found that WorldMate was the perpetrator!!!

I really hope it’s a bug and not an intentional feature! I assume that it’s very easy to have this connection undetected considering the customer base for this application is business people (who have their bill paid by the company) but someone is innocent until proven guilty… The app was connecting to internet on a daily basis downloading around 100 kb and I can only hope it was connecting to get the weather information. I personally don’t pay my phone bill but I don’t like to have any sort of spyware on my mobile so I uninstalled it

WorldMate picture taken from here

On a different note, the Log application on my mobile is great but why it does not also log which application is using my Access Point is beyond my comprehension…

Update 11 Dec 2007

You won’t believe that on the same day I received an email from Worldmate, I also received an email from another user saying that he got an email from Worldmate too but never gave any email address to them! Interesting!

I didn’t recall if I gave my email address to them or not, so I installed the application again to see the process. During the installation there is a step where I had to enter my email address, but you can easily put a fake email address there. One thing I can definively say is that I would like an option to decline any marketing stuff and not providing any email address at all when installing the application (rather than give a fake address).  Supposedly, I can unsubscribe from MobiMate newsletters when I receive one but I just did so I cannot comment if it works or not.

Also, I wanted to leave the application on my mobile for at least one day to check if it was still connecting to internet regardless of the settings but I really don’t want to waste more time with this application (If WorldMate wanted to fix the problem, they would have not added a fake comment to my blog!).

For your information, on the left it’s the disclaimer that says WorldMate collects personal info.

From WorldMate website:

What information do we collect?

This information includes customer name, address, city, postal code, country, email address. At this point in time, we do not collect credit card information but rather use it as it is obtained and then delete all record of it.

-Reda