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.'"

Comments

Re:Any teeth to these?

[qbzzt]

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.

Re:Any teeth to these?

[AuMatar]

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.

Relationship to NSA Tracking

[tabdelgawad]

I was going to submit the following Salon article to the front page, but this will have to do

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/21/att_n sa/index_np.html

You have to wonder if the two stories are related.

Re:It's time to take action.

[cayenne8]

"Does Vonage encrypt their traffic?"

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.

Re:It's time to take action.

[voice_of_all_reason]

Except in this case, where the german police decided acting "inconspicious" was suspicious in and of itself:

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?t ype=worldFootballNews&storyID=2006-06-06T201822Z_0 1_L06509705_RTRIDST_0_SPORT-SOCCER-WORLD-STRIPSEAR CH.XML

Re:Boycott by consumers?

[faedle]

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.