tMobile drops the ball: can we trust our telcos?

security focus recently posted a very scary story involving a large gsm cell phone company, a criminal computer hacker, and the us secret service.

but this raises the point--we give our personal numbers and info to these telcos, put our credit on the line, agree to ridiculous contracts, and pay massive phone bills for this service (not to mention penalty fees, late fees, early termination fees, blah, blah....), and it's all done with a certain amount of trust, right?

so, what happens when a breach occurs? what should the penalty be for all these tmobile customers whose private data were at risk? (not to mention any unfortunate soul who actually had their data abused...)

i think there should be a serious look at the way business is done in these sorts of markets. if you've got any input, you can post here or hit me up here.

--cid