IT HAS taken a while and some legal hurdles have had to be cleared but we now have access to a directory service that allows us to find the mobile phone numbers of people we don’t know.

Think about that for a minute and, chances are, you’ll start to appreciate the reason many privacy campaigners lobbied long and hard – but unsuccessfully – to prevent the launch.

It’s the latest in a series of information technology developments that have pushed us towards and beyond new boundaries. For many the question remains: do we really need to cross this particular boundary?

The new system costs £1 a pop and uses databases of numbers its operators say are freely available for purchase and in the public domain.

It claims to have some 15m numbers in its database.

Privacy campaigners remain angry after it was given the all-clear by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

The ICO ruled that the system did comply with current law and was little different from companies who use such contact lists for cold calling – and we all know what a welcome and positive contribution that technique makes to our modern lives, don’t we?

Information has always been a commodity, and like any commodity traded in a free market its stock rises and falls.

The people behind this new service, and their backers, have presumably satisfied themselves that there is money to be made, not wasted.

They get their numbers from three sources. First, market research companies who contact individuals and ask them if they would be prepared to allow their numbers to be used for commercial purposes.

The data is also from online businesses who ask customers to tick boxes during the normal course of online transactions and from brokers who buy and sell lists of phone numbers.