8 ms·

AT&T will start selling customers’ usage data

150 points by coloneltcb 13y ago

joshuaellinger 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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'.
nthj 13y ago
The bigger shock: they haven't already?
kjhughes 13y ago
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-privacy-policy.pdf http://assets.fiercemarkets.net/public/mdano/amis/att-privac... (Wouldn't want to make it easy and have a single URL for everything -- sheeze.)
- r00fus 13y ago
  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).
  - hkmurakami 13y ago
    even if it's not the only game in town, sometimes you don't have Verizon reception in your house/apartment (ex: Marco Arment). (That being said I have only used Verizon and T mobile. Our land line is AT&T though :( )
    - chrisbolt 13y ago
      Verizon has a femtocell you can install in your home: http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/store/accessory?&action=gotoFemtocell http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/store/accessory?&action=g...
    - nitrogen 13y ago
      Doesn't Verizon also have a data-sharing program that it's too late to opt out of?
  - jrockway 13y ago
    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.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
contingencies 13y ago
AT&T outsources their billing to AMDOCS. Your metadata isn't only on AT&T premises...
sciencerobot 13y ago
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
superuser2 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
venomsnake 13y ago
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"
andrewhillman 13y ago
They should make this opt-in and give those who opt-in a discounted monthly rate. Unfortunately, they are too greedy.
kbuck 13y ago
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).
seangarita 13y ago
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.
ChrisAntaki 13y ago
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/
Hovertruck 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    That would be annoying. Still, though, it wouldn't change my mind about this topic.
    - 3825 13y ago
      If you don't mind being throttled, why not pick T-Mobile and save a little money?
      - Hovertruck 13y ago
        I haven't experienced any throttling, and I use 3-4 gigs each month. Is T-Mobile that much cheaper...?
        3825 13y ago
        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.
medde 13y ago
Will they pass on the savings?
diminoten 13y ago
Anonymized. Why does anyone care about this if the data is anonymized?
- thwest 13y ago
  Anonymous data is not.
  - diminoten 13y ago
    Yeah, it is.
malandrew 13y ago
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/
guiambros 13y ago
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.
itg 13y ago
For anyone who wants to opt out: http://www.att.com/cmpchoice http://www.att.com/cmpchoice
mtanski 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
deanproxy 13y ago
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?
wtallis 13y ago
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?)
TrevorJ 13y ago
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.
vermontdevil 13y ago
Does this change your terms of agreement and enables you to opt out of the 2-year agreement without the ETF charge?

150 points by coloneltcb 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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'.

nthj 13y ago

The bigger shock: they haven't already?

kjhughes 13y ago

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-privacy-policy.pdf http://assets.fiercemarkets.net/public/mdano/amis/att-privac... (Wouldn't want to make it easy and have a single URL for everything -- sheeze.)

r00fus 13y ago
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).
- hkmurakami 13y ago
  even if it's not the only game in town, sometimes you don't have Verizon reception in your house/apartment (ex: Marco Arment). (That being said I have only used Verizon and T mobile. Our land line is AT&T though :( )
  - chrisbolt 13y ago
    Verizon has a femtocell you can install in your home: http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/store/accessory?&action=gotoFemtocell http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/store/accessory?&action=g...
  - nitrogen 13y ago
    Doesn't Verizon also have a data-sharing program that it's too late to opt out of?
- jrockway 13y ago
  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.
  - jlgreco 13y ago

contingencies 13y ago

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

sciencerobot 13y ago

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

superuser2 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.

venomsnake 13y ago

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"

andrewhillman 13y ago

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

kbuck 13y ago

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).

seangarita 13y ago

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.

ChrisAntaki 13y ago

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/

Hovertruck 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  That would be annoying. Still, though, it wouldn't change my mind about this topic.
  - 3825 13y ago
    If you don't mind being throttled, why not pick T-Mobile and save a little money?
    - Hovertruck 13y ago
      I haven't experienced any throttling, and I use 3-4 gigs each month. Is T-Mobile that much cheaper...?
      - 3825 13y ago
        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.

medde 13y ago

Will they pass on the savings?

diminoten 13y ago

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

thwest 13y ago
Anonymous data is not.
- diminoten 13y ago
  Yeah, it is.

malandrew 13y ago

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/

guiambros 13y ago

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.

itg 13y ago

For anyone who wants to opt out: http://www.att.com/cmpchoice http://www.att.com/cmpchoice

mtanski 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.

deanproxy 13y ago

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?

wtallis 13y ago

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?)

TrevorJ 13y ago

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.

vermontdevil 13y ago

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