“If you have AT&T’s gigabit Internet service and wonder why it seems so affordable, here’s the reason—AT&T is boosting profits by rerouting all your Web browsing to an in-house traffic scanning platform, analyzing your Internet habits, then using the results to deliver personalized ads to the websites you visit, e-mail to your inbox, and junk mail to your front door,” Jon Brodkin reports for Ars Technica.
“In a few select areas including Austin, Texas, and Kansas City, Missouri — places where AT&T competes against the $70-per-month Google Fiber — a Bell offers its own $70-per-month ‘GigaPower’ fiber-to-the-home Internet access,” Brodkin reports. “But signing up for the deal also opts customers in to AT&T’s ‘Internet Preferences’ program, which gives the company permission to examine each customer’s Web traffic in exchange for a price that matches Google’s.”
“AT&T charges at least another $29 a month ($99 total) to provide standalone Internet service that doesn’t perform this extra scanning of your Web traffic,” Brodkin reports. “The privacy fee can balloon to more than $60 for bundles including TV or phone service. Certain modem rental and installation fees also apply only to service plans without Internet Preferences.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: For everything, there is a price.
What’s a customer? Google and AT&T should be paying those people to use their internet.
AT&T would be better off being more upfront. Priced @ $100 per month, with a $30 discount if AT&T is allowed to analyze your internet traffic and Taylor adds to you. Would be better customer relations. 😀
Since when has AT&T been worried about customer relations?
. . . or been more upfront?
The ones who pay more for the privacy are red flagged to the NSA who reads your stuff anyway.
Some things should be illegal at any price.
That’s a mighty profound MDN Take.
isn’t this why people use VPN’s?
From the article:
“One possibility is you sign up for AT&T’s $30 discount and then you sign up for a $5-a-month VPN, and you say, ‘Screw you, AT&T,’” Gillula said.
Note that the NSA et al. have been hacking various VPNs since at least 2010. We’re currently waiting a definitive (we hope) list of hacked vs un-hacked VPN services. From last December:
NSA’s Vulcan Death Grip on VPNs
According to reports published this week by the German news magazine Der Speigel. The NSA (National Security Agency) has a division called the Office of Target Pursuit (OTP), which maintains a team of engineers assigned to cracking the VPN (Virtual Private Networks) encrypted traffic. It is believed that they have developed tools that have the potential to un encrypt the traffic of the majority of VPNs. A presentation by a member of OTP’s VPN Exploitation Team, dated September 13, 2010, details the process the NSA used.
We also know that Tor has been hacked as well, with no hope of it ever providing total anonymity/privacy.
BUT: It’s doubtful AT&T is going to be spending the time and $$$ to hack into a VPN or Tor. Hurray. 😀
The difference between customers and products are becoming blurred. Someone needs ti devise a method to charge advertisers for personal information sold.
I’m sure AT&T has. Turns out it’s worth about $29 per month. AT&T will collect that from you or the advertisers, they don’t care which.