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AT&T Rewrites Privacy Policy
VikingThunder writes "The San Francisco Chronicle reports that AT&T has revamped its privacy policy, in an effort to head off future consumer lawsuits, with changes taking effect this Friday. AT&T is introducing a new policy that gives it more 'latitude' when it comes to sharing your browsing history with government agencies. Notable changes include notification that AT&T will track viewing habits of customers of its new video services Homezone and U-Verse, which is forbidden for cable and satellite companies, as well as explicitly stating that the customer's data belongs to the company: 'While your account information may be personal to you, these records constitute business records that are owned by AT&T. As such, AT&T may disclose such records to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process.'"
The privacy policy is part of the contract. A company that violated its privacy policy, in a way that could be proven at court, could be sued. It's not a very strong guarantee (guess who can afford the better lawyers), but it's something.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
Any policy they can change at will without requiring you to sign an greement has no binding force. At best, you could sue for misrepresentation if they break it. Its definitely not breach of contract.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Here are links to the new policy and the current policy.
I was going to submit the following Salon article to the front page, but this will have to do
n sa/index_np.html
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/21/att_
You have to wonder if the two stories are related.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
Or just encrypt everything and run through proxies. They can share data until the cows come home, making any sense of it will be prohibitively expensive if you do it right.
If you don't like it, tough titties.
Paying in cash, not accepting value cards, and lying through your teeth on any papers they have you fill out (like rebates) also works remarkably well.
Does Vonage encrypt their traffic?
There's a good chance that your Internet traffic gets routed over an AT&T-controlled network at some point...
The article says that the new policy will be effective Friday, and since the article was published today, this equates to this upcoming Friday, 06/23/06. This probably means that the author of the article somehow got his hands on a copy of the new policy and that we'll have to wait til Friday to see it on the SBC frontpage, UNLESS they have it buried somewhere's in their press release statements.
Then spoof your MAC address.
Yes, they are very carefull not to stick anything like this into the actual contracts.
If you want privacy, have the government enact laws (feel free to copy as much as you want from our Scandinavian ones, privacy/consumer laws seem to be things we're reasonably good at). On the other hand, if the government is the problem, it's your own bloody fault, you (plural) elected it; vote something else next time.
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
I dunno...but, if you want to make their tracking data useless for you...start trying to encrypt ALL your internet traffic.
Grant it....it will slow you up a bit, but, will make you far less traceable. Set up anon. browsing, set up nym accounts for email...that will help your mail at least be encrypted, even from those who don't know how to use pgp.
- Tor - For anonymous browsing
- Freenet
- Anonymous Email (look for Nym section)
- Free Proxy servers (some https and anon listed)
- Set up and use Mixmaster anon remailers
In general, also start trying to use SSH and vpns for most everything you do....it is a bit slower and PITA, but, might be worth it in the end, considering this new policy, and the govt's recent attempts to get ALL ISP's to "voluntarilly" keep all internet access records stored for 2 years.Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Except in this case, where the german police decided acting "inconspicious" was suspicious in and of itself:
t ype=worldFootballNews&storyID=2006-06-06T201822Z_0 1_L06509705_RTRIDST_0_SPORT-SOCCER-WORLD-STRIPSEAR CH.XML
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?
Lots of corporations do internal handling of the phone network. So once a call disappears into company Foo's switching system, it's lost to the sending system.
So 555-555-1111 and 555-555-1112 both appear as a call to 'Foo', where only Foo knows to whom those phone lines route.
It's all Krista's Fault.
As the construction supervisor said to Arthur Dent referring to the amount of damage his equipment would recieve if he allowed them to simply run over Mr. Dent, "none at all."
AT&T is now the ILEC for the majority of America's most populous state (California), and recieves probably the majority of their day-to-day business from the Government itself. Even if 10% of consumers left AT&T for somebody else, they'd laugh it off: after all, most of those consumers are purchasing low-profit and high cost services anyway.
Besides, who are you going to go to? Where are you going to get local dialtone from if you live in Los Angeles or San Francisco? Go ahead. Buy it from a CLEC. If you can find one still selling service, guess who's gonna still get the revenue for the copper loop? Okay, so I'll go get service from the cable company. Oh, right. Comcast. A company that AT&T owns stock in.
Yep. You can run, but you can't hide.
I have no problem with wiretaps, if they are warranted. These days, it is not difficult to get the warrant...you could just show some evidence that the person may be linked to a terrorist organization, and wahlah, you have a warrant.
I think that you meant "Voilà", it means "Here".
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano