Peter Griffin: Don't be another Paris Hilton

Poor Paris Hilton. The celebrity heiress to the hotel chain fortune must be cursing technology and the internet since the phone numbers and emails of her celebrity mates as well as her private pictures were plastered across the web.

A shiver went down my spine when I heard Hilton had been hacked. What if I, too, was subject to a malicious attack and someone obtained my mobile phone contact book?

People could be crank-calling my mum, my local Indian takeaway or, God forbid, my dentist. In Hilton's case it was famous associates Anna Kournikova, Lindsay Lohan and Eminem who were deluged with calls from random web surfers.

Even the number of actor Adrien Brody, who is still working on King Kong in Wellington, was bandied about. I wonder if he was stung for the reverse long-distance charges when the calls started coming.

It's become a bit of a sport assembling as big a contact book as possible, even if most of the numbers stored are seldom, if ever, called. Now services are available to store your contacts online so that if your phone is stolen, drowned or crushed, your social life doesn't go with it.

Such a service proved to be Hilton's undoing.

T-Mobile, her mobile phone provider, hasn't divulged how the breach took place. It may be that someone managed to get hold of her fancy Sidekick mobile smartphone where the username and password to her personal online portal may be permanently saved.

But it's more likely that she chose an overly simple password for her T-Mobile internet account and that the inventive hacker was able to guess it. Some have jokingly suggested the name of her pet pooch, Tinkerbell, as the offending password.

Most hackers of telephone and internet systems rely on the fact that people are lazy in choosing passwords to protect their accounts. A hacker was able to gain access to the voicemail boxes and phone extensions of several Auckland businesses and schools last year for that very reason. Some of the four-digit passwords programmed into the voicemail systems amounted to 1-2-3-4. Once you're in, you're in.

As we become ever more entwined in the web, memorising the various passwords becomes a nightmare. You've got your Hotmail account, your internet banking, your Trade Me and numerous other web services you subscribe to. Do you bet the farm and use the same password for everything, hoping no one ever finds out what it is? Or do you choose a different password for each account? The latter makes more sense.

But with key-logging software circulating the web and designed to record every keystroke you make on your computer keyboard and transmit the information remotely, even complex passwords aren't fool-proof.

Nevertheless, central information repositories, such as the one Hilton was using, will soon be a reality for most mobile phone users.

At least two New Zealand companies have these services available.

SimWorks (www.simworks.co.nz) allows subscribers to wirelessly back up their phone/SIM contacts to a centralised repository. You can then manage all your contact details through a web browser.

A similar service is provided by Fonetango (www.fonetango.co.nz). As Fonetango explains, lose your phone and once you've finished the thumb-numbing task of re-entering numbers into your new phone, there will still be tonnes of people that you can't call any more because you either can't find their number or don't even remember you had it in the first place - until you try to give them a call one day, that is.

The Fonetango service costs $4.95 a month or $49.95 a year.

Both services also engage in so-called social networking, which allows other subscribers who match certain criteria to see your personal contact details.

It's only a matter of time before Vodafone and Telecom offer these types of services as a value-add on a regular mobile phone subscription.

Vodafone already gives you a webmail email account and lets you access your account online. With a Telecom mobile you can now post the digital photos taken on your camera phone to a password-protected online photo album.

Telecom has for some time been considering an online repository system to get around the fact that its 025 and 027 phones don't have SIM cards. This would make changing phones and transporting contact lists easier.

Even if your contact list isn't as glitzy as Paris Hilton's, you want to know your personal information is safe and be active in protecting it.