Patent ID: 7127231

Claim:
A method for operating a billing system associated with a mobile radio network for billing for tariff based use of data provided by a network-external data store, where the data are used based on retrieval using a mobile terminal belonging to a user of the mobile radio network, comprising: transmitting, by the mobile terminal, a user address, identifying the user, and a data identifier, identifying the data which are to be retrieved, to an intermediate node connected to the mobile radio network; generating, by the intermediate node, an anonymous user identifier from the user address using encryption; transmitting, by the intermediate node, the anonymous user identifier and the data identifier to the data store, as a result of which the data store is prompted to transmit a cost variable, associated with the retrieved data, and the anonymous user identifier to the billing system; using a key associated with the encryption to recover the user address from the anonymous user identifier; and using the user address and the cost variable to debit a cost account which is associated with the user.