T-Mobile blocks MinuteWatcher from tracking cell minutes

July 12, 2006
T-Mobile is blocking MinuteWatcher, a service that lets customers actively monitor their wireless minutes usage. T-Mobile has changed conditions in their policy and taken technical measures to prevent MinuteWatcher from tracking T-Mobile members voluntary tracking of cellphone usage. Specifically, T-Mobile now includes the following text in their Terms of Use: "With respect to your access to the http://my.t-mobile.com site, T-Mobile hereby specifically reserves the right (a) to limit the number of times you may log in to this site within a certain period of time and/or (b) to restrict your use of automated scripts, plug-ins, and/or other third-party devices to obtain information (e.g., unbilled usage data) from this site."

Way to go T-Mobile! Way to piss off your customer base. As if MinuteWatcher was sucking gobs of bandwidth to pull the customer's cellphone usage. I don't think so. The data downloaded was probably less than 2,000 bytes. Even if it was a bit larger, I'm sure T-Mobile has the bandwidth available. This is clearly designed to block customers from knowing exactly how many minutes left they have on their plan before they start incurring expensive overage charges.

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Comments to T-Mobile blocks MinuteWatcher from tracking cell minutes


  1. PhoneBoy :
    July 12, 2006 8:30 PM

    You can dial #646# from your T-Mobile phone and you get your number of minutes used instantly. So how is this preventing people from knowing when they're going into overage territory exactly?


  1. Tom Keating[TypeKey Profile Page] :
    July 12, 2006 8:44 PM

    Thanks for the tip, Phoneboy. I don't have T-Mobile, so I didn't know they had a shortcut for acquiring the minutes. Still, restricting scripts from accessing their website seems a bit overboard. Maybe someone may want to write a script that retrieves his/her voicemail and emails it or something.


  1. PhoneBoy :
    July 12, 2006 8:47 PM

    What would be better would be to create an XMLRPC API (or something similar) to allow script kiddies to "have fun" as opposed to screen-scraping the T-Mobile portal. Now that would be cool.


  1. voip requirements list :
    August 29, 2007 7:52 PM

    this is disapointing but they seem to have taken care of the situation. minutes can be tracked via mytomobile and from the handset itself. happy to see a telecom do something to makes its customers happy.


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