Editorial Note: In the aftermath of the NSA revelations, I’ve been writing more and more posts on privacy and ways to help secure it. From this post on I will use the tag “Privacy” to mark these.
AT&T, my wireless carrier, has joined other large communication companies in deciding that our data really belongs to them and that they are going to sell it to advertisers. It’s OK, they say, because everyone is doing it. There’s the usual “no personal identification will be given to advertisers; we just want to give you better ads” nonsense. This is basically what Google is doing but this time we’re paying the carriers and they still feel free to appropriate our data and sell it. Really, it’s despicable.
Anyone with a clue already knows that cell phones—especially smart phones—are tracking devices but that doesn’t mean that our carriers should get to sell that information to anyone willing to buy it. Ideally, it would be illegal to collect and store this information (except maybe for engineering purposes and then only with identifying information removed). Of course, the usual 3-letter agencies would run screaming to Congress about the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse so that probably isn’t in our immediate future.
Fortunately, at least for AT&T, you can opt out of this program as this Forbes article explains. I urge everyone to take the time to do this. If we don’t push back—now and hard—it will only get worse.