
AT&T will start selling customers’ usage data - coloneltcb
http://gigaom.com/2013/07/03/heres-a-big-shock-att-will-start-selling-customers-usage-data/
======
kjhughes
AT&T customers: Opt out here:

 _Program One: "External Marketing & Analytics Reports"_

[http://www.att.com/cmpchoice](http://www.att.com/cmpchoice) or call
1.866.344.9850

 _Program Two: Relevant Advertising including "Wireless Location
Characteristics"_

Go to
[http://adworks.att.com/adpreferences](http://adworks.att.com/adpreferences)
on your computer or
[http://adworks.att.com/mobileoptout](http://adworks.att.com/mobileoptout) on
your wireless device.

Source: AT&T customer letter from Robert W. Quinn Jr. AT&T Senior Vice
President - Federal Regulatory & Chief Privacy Officer
[http://assets.fiercemarkets.net/public/mdano/amis/att-
privac...](http://assets.fiercemarkets.net/public/mdano/amis/att-privacy-
policy.pdf)

(Wouldn't want to make it easy and have a single URL for everything --
sheeze.)

~~~
r00fus
Wouldn't it be better to consider opting out of AT&T altogether? I can
understand that for some folks it's the only game in town, but others are
staying for some perceived benefit "grandfathered unlimited data" or the
shackles of the 2 year contract.

Combined with their adding hidden fees recently, and their general
friendliness with the NSA and snooping, I don't see major benefits to staying
there as opposed to Verizon (more coverage) or Tmobile (cheaper by far).

~~~
jrockway
As someone who pretty much never leaves the city, I'm very happy with
T-Mobile. Unlimited everything for $70 a month. And there's no contract; I
walked into the store, said "may I have a SIM and the unlimited everything
plan", gave them a 4 digit number to use as a PIN, and walked out. I could
hardly believe that this was happening to me in the United States, but hey.

Verizon may have slightly faster speeds and better coverage, but T-Mobile's
user experience cannot be beat.

~~~
recuter
Can you pay with cash? What personal details do you have to provide? I find
burner SIMs handy to avoid marketing efforts, every time I get hassled I let
it expire and pop in a fresh one. But I'm outside the US currently.

~~~
3825
I believe the poster above was talking about postpaid which I believe includes
a _soft_ pull on your credit. It is $70 a month but you still pay it at the
end of the month (I assume your monthly bill could go higher if you call
premium services or dial international numbers).

~~~
jrockway
No, I got a prepaid plan. They wanted my name, date of birth, a PIN, and $87.
I used a credit card.

~~~
3825
Thank you for the reply. Very interesting. Did they verify your date of birth
(such as driving license)? Or just took your word for it?

~~~
jrockway
They just took my word for it.

------
mtanski
I personally really wish people would put their focus on the IMPORTANT privacy
issues instead of hanging onto every time someone mentions sharing data. In my
mind it dilutes the message.

I consider important issues to be ones like stories of NSA spying, police
accessing phones without warrants, rights of kids in school to not be search
without a warrant and probable cause.

AT&T (or anyone else) selling AGGREGATED anonymized data is not really a news
story. Say they make a few extra bucks and the people who use this data find
their research easier. Big deal.

I don't see this case being different from other anonymized and aggregated
data sources. The census comes to mind, it's used by government, researchers
and yes advertisers as well. Examples of other aggregated and anodized data-
sets that members of hacker news find interesting include mobile browser usage
by geo-area, application usage, map of iphone density, hacker news post
analysis, economic analysis (like debt).

So keep on the good fight for privacy, but lets not go tilting windmills.

~~~
Someone
As
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5988869](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5988869)
said, anonymizing data through aggregation is surprisingly hard.

I vaguely remember a mathematical result that shows how hard it (maybe showing
it to be for all practical purposes impossible), but cannot find it.

------
wtallis
Hilarious. AT&T can barely manage to keep track of my DSL usage for billing
purposes (a $10/50GB surcharge for data in excess of 150GB/month). My attempts
to look up my current usage have a failure rate in excess of 20%, and when
their website _is_ able to show me their "data", it is several days out of
date and hardly a month goes by where their numbers don't have some ridiculous
inconsistency with my router logs (such as AT&T under-reporting the amount of
data I downloaded in a day by almost 50%).

I guess I can believe them when they say the data they sell will be anonymized
- the data they give _me_ is already half way there, and any significant
aggregation will finish the job. (Unless this data for sale is derived from
some measurement mechanism that is more accurate and reliable than what their
billing system uses, but that would make their billing system rather
fraudulent, wouldn't it?)

------
superuser2
My parents generation's favorite pastime is to chide today's youth for their
lack of boundaries, for failing to grasp the concept of privacy and placing
unwarranted trust in this unnatural, newfangled "social media" thing. It's
rather ironic that the first major tech company to sell user data to outside
entities is not Facebook, like my parents insisted it would be. It's the
company they've trusted all their lives. The company that every New York Times
columnist and public radio host and privacy advocate and concerned parent and
anyone who's ever complained about "kids these days" trusted unconditionally
to deliver their voices to their loved ones in the most intimate, personal,
and pivotal moments of life. That's the one that betrayed me.

(Advertisers come to Facebook asking that their ads be shown to certain
interest categories, and Facebook uses your data internally to comply with
that request. Facebook doesn't share your data with any outside entities
(employers, background check agencies, etc.) unless you ask it to, or if the
government shows up with a court order. The "violation of privacy" committed
by companies doing internal ad targeting is hundreds of orders of magnitude
less severe than selling personal information to outside entities.)

~~~
mikestew
Don't get too sentimental. The AT&T of your parent's generation and mine
(which may intersect) is the Ma Bell of the monopoly days. I have never
trusted AT&T any further than I could throw the whole lot of them. A half a
dozen name changes and buyouts since has only increased my mistrust.

------
kbuck
They'll probably make a large sum of cash out of it, too, and subscribers
definitely won't see a decrease in their bill.

I was rather surprised myself when I priced out wireless service; AT&T came
out $20 more expensive than everywhere else and their reps couldn't come up
with a way to give me a more competitive price. I went elsewhere (as I was
planning to do anyway).

Unfortunately I am stuck with AT&T for my residential internet access; my
apartment isn't wired for cable (and refuses to let the cable company wire
it), AT&T is the only available phone service, and sonic.net doesn't have a
nearby DSL hub. That leaves me with U-Verse, dialup, or something wireless
(and therefore laggy).

------
malandrew
If someone successfully deanonymizes the data, would that make AT&T liable for
damages? You really don't need that many bits of entropy to accurately
identify someone.

relevant: [http://33bits.org/](http://33bits.org/)

------
contingencies
AT&T outsources their billing to AMDOCS. Your metadata isn't only on AT&T
premises...

------
joshuaellinger
I work for AT&T in prospect direct marketing and I can't see any of the
customer data. They are a lot more protective of this information than you
might expect.

~~~
pekk
Of course they are, they wouldn't want to make it worth less to sell that
information to other companies. And, after all, AT&T has no obligations except
to make money, and no public oversight. The best part is that since AT&T makes
money off of this surveillance (even more information than NSA has out of
AT&T, with less procedure) nobody is particularly upset about it. We are all
just used to the idea that everything we do or say is owned by some private
company which is empowered to sell it to whoever, and nobody wants to change
it because there's money to be made.

~~~
joshuaellinger
Actually, they are horribly afraid of getting sued for privacy violations. Not
that anyone would win but the directors involved get a big black eye if anyone
had data and it wasn't cleared through legal.

They got dragged into a class-action lawsuit involving credit data before my
time and thus everyone in the marketing organization is very careful to follow
the rules. Unlike the big banks, they don't view fines and lawsuits as 'cost
of doing business'.

------
venomsnake
The day Torrentfreak told about the VPN payments ban from mastercard and visa.

As close to a conspiracy theory as it can get. What scares me is that there is
no conspiracy and every big entity is hell bent on destroying any shreds of
privacy left for fun, profit or to stop "child porn terrorists"

------
ChrisAntaki
Didn't they start this in 2006, with NSA as the customer? Oh, but that wasn't
anonymized.
[http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/05/mark_klein_docu/](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/05/mark_klein_docu/)

------
guiambros
I can't understand why it took them so long. Seriously, not trolling. Fear of
regulation, maybe?

The geospatial data they (and all other carriers) have is a gold mine for
advertisers, researchers, marketers, etc. AT&T never had any trouble screwing
users in order to make money, so I doubt it's scrupulous or moral grounds. The
only reason I can imagine is that they weren't _allowed_ to do it.

I guess this became so ubiquitous - everybody and their mother are now
tracking you: Facebook, Google Latitude, Apple, Glancee, Banjo, plus thousands
of other geofencing-enabled apps - that FCC can't say anything about AT&T
jumping on the bandwagon, too.

------
nthj
The bigger shock: they haven't already?

------
andrewhillman
They should make this opt-in and give those who opt-in a discounted monthly
rate. Unfortunately, they are too greedy.

------
seangarita
As far as I can recall, I pay ATT an arm and a leg to do business with them
and to not be the product being sold. I guess that distinction is out the
window. I don't know whether this presents a new interesting market
opportunity or just a taste of the unfortunate inevitable future.

------
Hovertruck
Hmm. This may be an unpopular opinion but I guess I don't really care. I love
my AT&T plan since I'm still grandfathered in for unlimited data. I'm not
going to walk away from it, especially not when I'm just part of a bunch of
anonymous statistics.

~~~
sillysaurus
Don't worry, they'll figure out a way to get you off your unlimited plan. For
example, my coworker, who was also grandfathered into their unlimited plan,
once came into work complaining that AT&T had throttled him to 20k/sec for the
rest of the month. When he called them up, they told him he had used more than
2GB in a month, and so was throttled.

~~~
Hovertruck
That would be annoying. Still, though, it wouldn't change my mind about this
topic.

~~~
3825
If you don't mind being throttled, why not pick T-Mobile and save a little
money?

~~~
Hovertruck
I haven't experienced any throttling, and I use 3-4 gigs each month. Is
T-Mobile that much cheaper...?

~~~
3825
It will cost you about $80 ($70 + taxes and fees) for an individual plan.

Your mileage may vary though. It is pretty good in cities. Do you travel out
in the middle of nowhere much? T-Mobile might not be the best for you. When I
think of satellite phones, I imagine being in a situation that would require
me to call for rescue.

~~~
Hovertruck
That's basically what I pay for AT&T, but to make the switch I'd have to break
my contract.

~~~
3825
The big promise is that you don't have a contract anymore. Perhaps if enough
people switch ATT and Verizon will consider having this option as well.
Additionally, since they have more spectrum per customer, their service will
marginally get better with time unlike ATT or Verizon.

I quoted the $70+ figure because you use 3 - 4 GB data per month. You will
still keep unlimited data without throttling.

------
deanproxy
Is it possible to get out of a contract with them over this without paying the
ridiculous ETF? It states you can if they change you contract at all, and this
constitutes a change to me, but does it with them?

------
sciencerobot
Looks like they're updating their privacy policy:
[http://www.att.com/gen/privacy-
policy?pid=2506](http://www.att.com/gen/privacy-policy?pid=2506).

edit = formatting

------
TrevorJ
I've dealt with customer support at a lot of companies, and AT&T was the worst
I have ever encountered. This news just confirms my feeling that I'll never do
business with them.

------
itg
For anyone who wants to opt out:
[http://www.att.com/cmpchoice](http://www.att.com/cmpchoice)

------
vermontdevil
Does this change your terms of agreement and enables you to opt out of the
2-year agreement without the ETF charge?

------
medde
Will they pass on the savings?

------
diminoten
Anonymized. Why does anyone care about this if the data is anonymized?

~~~
thwest
Anonymous data is not.

~~~
diminoten
Yeah, it is.

