

AT&T is charging an extra $29/month to opt out of “tracking information” - taurussai
http://www.businessinsider.com/att-gigapower-tackles-google-fiber-in-kansas-city--but-its-charging-more-for-privacy-2015-2

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hackuser
On one hand, I applaud AT&T for giving users an option. On the other ...

1) It assumes privacy is not a right, but a priveledge you pay for. People who
can't afford ~$360/year have just as much right to privacy as those who can.
This is what government regulation is for, to prevent the negative
consequences of open marketplace competition.

2) It's a limited, almost pointless solution. Everyone else can track you:
Your phone provider knows everwhere you go, everyone you communicate with,
what you say to them, etc. On your computer, websites, ad networks, hosted
services (Google, Facebook, etc.). Your electric company, your TV, your credit
card company, etc. etc. AT&T might buy info from other sources on the
customers who pay to prevent ISP tracking. (And what if each of those vendors
charged $360/year for the priveledge of privacy?) Again, the only solution is
government regulation; individuals can't hope to protect themselves.

3) It's expensive, as expensive as a cheap Internet connection.

Is it priced at cost plus a margin? If so, that implies each user's tracking
data is worth maybe $20/month to AT&T. That seems very high; if users only
knew what they were giving away!

Or is it priced at what AT&T thinks the market will bear? Is there really a
market for limited privacy at $30/month?

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0x5f3759df-i
Does this somehow conflict with the DCMA safe harbor provisions? I thought the
deal was that they weren't responsible for the things done on their network as
long as they don't know about it.

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pdkl95
Forget the DMCA - someone should mention to the fundies that the it's time to
for another round of Obscenity lawsuits. If the ISP wants to _volunteer_ that
they have enough information to filter[1] for "obscene"[2] pages, then they
can have the liability as well, or at lest the "fun" of having to defend
against fundies wielding banhammers.

[1] the fact that a perfect filter is impossible isn't relevant - it just has
to be good enough to catch "enough" to allow a parent to think they have
"protected" their kid from the scary things on the internet.

[2] Finding things on the internet that would qualify ss "obscene" is trivial,
especially if someone were to get creative in how they apoply Miller Test
style "community standards".

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rayiner
I hate the precedent of having to opt-out of targeted advertising, but I hate
even more that I can't pay Google (or Facebook, etc), any amount of money to
do so.

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blfr
Does Google track pages visited by their fibre subscribers?

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rayiner
I don't think there is any doubt that the synergy with a Google services,
which do track, is part of the basic business proposition of Fiber for Google.
Given that, exactly where the tracking happens is an implementation detail.
The end result is that for most customers, the $70 price point is subsidized
by tracking.

~~~
blfr
They explicitly say that there is no such synergy on Fiber. So whatever AT&T
is selling for $30 is already included in the regular price of Google Fiber.

 _Other information from the use of Google Fiber Internet (such as URLs of
websites visited or content of communications) will not be associated with the
Google Account you use for Fiber, except with your consent or to meet any
applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental
request._

[https://fiber.google.com/legal/privacy.html](https://fiber.google.com/legal/privacy.html)

~~~
rayiner
Signing up for Fiber requires creating a Google account, and the way the
policy is written, they can share non-personally identifiable information
about your online activity with advertisers so long as they don't tie it to
your Google account. Between those two clauses, and pervasive use of
Search/Gmail/Analytics, there's probably little activity they can't pick up.

Also, note that they explicitly say they'll tie your TV-viewing habits to your
Google account. It's easy to overlook this, but TV ad revenue is still 50%
higher than online ad revenue, so this is a major synergy.

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azurelogic
Fortunately, you can host your own VPN server on DigitalOcean for $5/month.
Heck, you could probably even get away with one of atlantic.net's $1/month
servers.

~~~
hackuser
> Fortunately, you can host your own VPN server on DigitalOcean for $5/month.
> Heck, you could probably even get away with one of atlantic.net's $1/month
> servers.

Does DigitalOcean track you any less than AT&T?

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harrystone
This is how cynical I've become about this kind of stuff, I see it as a small
victory that AT&T admits they're doing it.

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sctb
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9059476](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9059476)

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frozenport
Its important to note that this is as much a telecom vs Google issue, as it is
a privacy issue.

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haspoken
Any suggestions for a way to poison the data. Say an autobrowser that could
generate traffic to obscure your actual traffic?

Any other ideas?

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joshbaptiste
not an issue , these days you can get an OpenVZ VPS for $15/yr on
lowendbox.com that gives you 1 or 2TB bandwidth a month, tunnel your web
traffic via "ssh -D" and your done.

~~~
FireBeyond
Err, sure. And that $15/yr box will give you 1TB bandwidth a month, which you
can instantly half (transfer in, transfer out), and have a 10mbps uplink,
which you can instantly half, for the same reason.

Oh good, your gigabit fiber is now limited to 500GB/month at 5mbps or less.

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torrey_braman
vpn?

