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Verizon Wireless Changes Privacy Policy
First time accepted submitter flash2011 writes "Recently Verizon changed its home internet TOS to by default share your location with advertisers. Now Verizon Wireless has also changed its privacy policy to by default share your web browsing history, cell phone location and app usage as well. Whilst there have been a few stories on these changes, internet forums have largely been quiet. Where is the outrage? Or have we just come to accept that ISPs are going to sell our personal information and web browsing habits?"
yes
we must impeach Verizon
worst president ever.
They're all going to collect some type of data from its users and sell it. The question now is - Are they putting peoples' names next to that data or are they just looking at log files, counting how many times the person, or group of persons in a region, access that data at any given time?
I'm just pissed that I don't get a cut of that cash they're making by selling info about what I do (not that I have any Verizon services).
That's what I do on my android phone.
I have DroidWall installed and I simply block unwanted "services" from internet access.
There's other alternatives on android, such-as "freezing" services.
Zoom Player Lead Dev.
I'm already reading about how more and more companies are exposing our privacy in order to make an extra buck. But what I want to know is this. How does the top executive staff feel about them and their own family members having to eat their own dog food. Or...do they???
Life is not for the lazy.
These people will have their way with you, and you will like it! And if you don't, too bad. Whatever policy they have will be a sham, so why not just tell the truth and sell you out? Whaddya gonna do about it, eh? You gonna switch? To whom? HAHAHAHA...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
I use Verizon for both cell phone and internet. Anyone care to share how you go about opting out? Thanks.
This is unacceptable!
If you're locked into a Verizon contract, Verizon just gave you the option to cancel without paying a penalty. They've made a material change in the terms, and you now have the right to exit the contract.
Am glad I am too poor to afford Verizon service any more, you are much harder to track when your phone boasts SMS as its top feature
I am not sure how it works in the US, but here in Canada when a celco changes its terms, it allows the end user to cancel his contract without an ECF. That is, unless the celco agrees to honour the terms of the original contract as signed for its duration. So assuming the 2 year contract also says something to the effect of user agrees with the privacy policy, I would argue that makes the privacy policy part of the contract and is thus grounds for cancelation. Thoughts?
Is it just me, or are most of the technological innovations in the last decade mainly about monetizing consumer behavior tracking?
Google has an entire ecosystem built up around you using their "free" services in exchange for mining your data to improve search results and advertising clickthroughs. Facebook takes it another step and explicitly states that all your personal data is for sale to advertisers. Amazon has all sorts of creepy analytics sorting through your purchase and shopping history, and now they will have full access to Kindle Fire users' web browsing habits. If the late 90s through early 2000s was the dotcom bubble, the late 2000s through the early 2010s appears to be the customer marketing data bubble. Who knows what will come of this...
What I don't get is why this data is so useful to advertisers. I've almost never bought anything based solely on an ad. Maybe other people are more easily manipulated, but generally I need to try something first or have a real (non-marketroid) person give me a recommendation before I give money away to someone. I'm one of those annoying skeptics in the IT department who take vendor-sponsored "whitepapers" on products with a grain of salt. I guess advertising works on some subset of the population....otherwise businesses wouldn't waste money on it.
We'll see what happens with the privacy thing as well. Either the Web 2.0 crowd is going to completely take over and there will be zero privacy in any aspect of one's life, or people might start realizing that Google and Facebook don't just put these cool services out there for free. I'm not a tinfoil hat guy, but I really don't want the kind of hyper-targeted advertising that knowing my location, presumably my credit score and browsing history would present. Problem is that for every one of me, there 10 million others who don't care or just click I Agree to the new terms because they want the cool service.
This is pretty entertaining, wonder if all the Facebook stuff will hold any water, and how that's going to affect this. IF it's going to affect this...?
It's like this...
You know it's gonna be some bubba in jail that gets yer tender ass,
at least this is the nicest and cleanest smelling one.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
What precisely they are allowed to do is tightly regulated by the Cable and Telecommunications act, specifically the sections governing "Personally Identifiable Information". A brief summer of the act can be found here. Note the following section:
Cable operators generally are prohibited from using their cable systems to collect personally identifiable information concerning any subscriber without the prior written or electronic consent of the subscriber. ... Notice to the subscriber must be in the form of a separate, written statement and must be clear and conspicuous. Notice must also be given at least once every year that the agreed upon service is provided. "Personally identifiable information" does not include any record of aggregate data which does not identify particular persons.
Whether this constitues usage of PII is dubious at best. Indeed you may see other major telcos step in and sue seeing as incorrect usage of this data gives Verizon an unfair market advantage.
What do I install on my remote server to make my DD-WRT router send all my traffic encrypted to a remote proxy that resends it after it's past my local ISP? All traffic, all protocols, even re-encrypting SSL, ssh and other encrypted traffic.
Protecting ourselves from this relentless snooping should be an apt-get away.
--
make install -not war
"It's just a fucking piece of paper"
--
BMO
Apps like Viber will seriously eat into their bottom line. Will they try and disable it or charge for Viber texts?
I do believe they are aggregating the data but IMO even that is crossing the line for an ISP.
PocketPermissions Android Permission Guide
This kind of stuff is ridiculous when you're already paying a lot of money for service. But lots of companies are taking advantage of digital consumers in lots of ways already. ISPs, like Charter for example, default to giving you a search page when DNS requests fail. This page is not only full of sponsored ads, but it breaks how the internet is supposed to work when a domain doesn't exist. Fortunately, Charter finally implemented a way to fully opt out (after a long time of a useless method), but the default is still the search page which most people will never change. And we all know the stories of ISPs replacing ads in pages with your own, or inserting new ads altogether, or creating profiles of sites you visit and selling it to advertisers. Who cares about the user when there's money to be made.
We need privacy laws to stop it, because if you're counting on the free market/capitalism/blah blah to "work things out on its own" (as I've been told by people before when discussing privacy issues), then you're incredibly naive. Greed runs these companies' decisions, and when nearly every company is doing it, or there's no other company in your area to service you, then you're stuck. Time for more of those government regulations that people love to hate.
Vote for Saint Vidicon of Cathode, he is a main component of the resistance!
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
FTFA:
The program is opt-out so if the targeting is troubling you'll have to change your privacy settings.
Opt out and move on with your life, instead of whining about it here.
I think it is incredibly naive to believe that you are immune to advertising. Most people think they are immune to advertisements but research shows that advertising affects how all of us make decisions.
When you go to the store to buy peanut butter do you care if you pick up Jiff or Peter Pan? I can assure you the J.M. Smucker company and ConAgraFoods care a great deal. They carefully design the packaging, pay for competitive shelf space, and run advertisements that have been shown to subtly influence which jar you grab as you walk through the grocery store.
Even with more significant purchases where you "have a real (non-marketroid) person give me a recommendation before I give money away", I think you will find advertising has influenced which products you even consider looking at. Most likely whatever led you to look at that product will subtly bias your impression of reviews and which factors you look at.
Furthermore, those 'non-marketroid' persons may well be advertisers themselves. Magazines like to review products. The magazines know that if they produce a poor review, the vender will stop buying ads in that magazine. Perhaps that is why many reviews look like paid advertisements.
Not all advertisements take the form of a banner ad or newspaper insert. Some advertisements are articles in trade magazines that are nearly verbatim quotes from a press release. Have you ever heard a politician running his mouth in front of the press? That is because he wants to get his issue and himself in the headlines (advertise). Ever notice that radio stations tend to have a 40-song playlist that they run over-and-over again? Those songs are advertisements placed by the record labels. Ever heard of product placement in movies? Those products are donated by vendors to increase brand awareness.
Businesses spend billions advertising their products because those advertisements influence which products people buy. You sir, make decisions based on advertisements whether you realize it or not.
I believe that only applies to cable television (i.e. which pay-per-view movies you have watched).
It is not opt-in because Verizon wants it, else it be opt-in. The notification of such policy for the average Verizon user is likely similar to the joke about the plans for a new highway in "the hitcher's guide".
Does anyone know whether the information logged and/or sold is based only on your traffic log, deep packet inspection or is Verizon forcing a spying application on every phone. For example, if I'm browsing on a blackberry via a blackberry proxy, will Verizon log the sites or only the fact that I'm VPN'ed back to he BES server?
Where is the outrage?
If you you read the fine print (you may need a microscope) you'll probably find that outrage is prohibited by the ToS.
So when companies and marketing firms do focus groups and product testing, they compensate the user (aka person they are collecting marketing information on).
So now these companies, WHOM YOU PAY MONEY TO FOR PHONE SERVICE BTW, find it necessary to a) collect your information, b) sell your information, and c) to serve you advertisements (because buying their product apparently isn't enough anymore). And they want to sell YOUR information without providing YOU compensation for it. AND, they want you to know, even if you "OPT OUT" of giving away virtually EVERY identifiable piece of information pertaining to our DIGITAL LIVES, they will STILL SEND YOU ADS.
Wow, back in the day, a purveyor of products/services wouldn't have dared steal, cheat, and fraud their customers AND how openly!!!
I mean, facebook, nobody should have been surprised about them selling your information, it's a free service. Same with LinkedIn, oh, nope, LinkedIn MAKES you pay AND mines your data AND sells your data. Ouch!!! Very brazen!!!
Open Source anyone? Corporations sure are doing a good job of stealing, lying, and cheating you at EVERY CORNER.
OH, they told you to your face that they were going to basically fraud you (aka make money off of you without your explicit permission, at your behest, etc). You will never, singlehandedly, give your permission for ANY of the information you give. Eventually you will forget that this information is being "stolen" from you, and yet these corporations will STILL be making money off of you. You will NEVER have been compensated ONCE for this. You will NEVER have given your express written/verbal/elsewise permission for EVEN ONE of these times your information was collected and shared.
Companies want to find out about your habits, they can pay you, the old fashioned way. There is no substitute for doing things right (both in an ethical/morale sense and in a sense of doing something effectively, that's both of those simultaneously, as in, effective to the limits of being ethical).
I just received an e-mail about this a few days ago. Here is the link you can use to opt out of this:
www.vzw.com/myprivacy
Login with your account info, and you can then opt out all of the phone lines on your account. Be sure to get all three separate options on that page.
Surely the best pay back for this intrusion, would be to give these people more but rubbish data, an application that randomly chooses a subject or product and then tells a other instances of the same application the choice for today, all the devices then make a few searches for the Items. So the data will show that hundreds of people in the north east are interested in Yak fondling, while many people in the LA are looking for juniper flavored yogurt. Could be real fun for every one.
Verizon uses the same boilerplate contract for all its regular customers because it would take too much time (and therefore money) to negotiate and implement millions of individual contracts. But it's conceivable that a small handful of highly-paid executives could effectively set their own terms of service as a perquisite. Perhaps the more privacy-conscious among them have "opted out" of the more nefarious terms and conditions.
Pray they do not change it further.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Google holds the record of being the only place I've ever clicked through an ad and bought something. If I'm looking for an item, and I search for it, I have a look at the ads. Why? Because in almost every case it is a company that wishes to sell me that product. Clicking on the ad takes me right to it in most cases. That's useful advertising.
I'm not defending this particular thing, but the grandparent is right that there is good to customizing ads. Heck, anyone who has read a magazine like IEEE Spectrum knows that looking at the ads can be nearly as fun as the articles because you get to see cool stuff you might be interested in (if you are the kind of person who reason Spectrum, you are going to be interested in the esoteric stuff the ads feature). If you get the ads anyhow, better that they are what you might want.
Stores do the same thing. Target prints out coupons and it is very clear that they are base don your buying history. Many of them I toss because they are either things they are showing to everyone (trying to get rid of overstock or something) but many I use because it is for something I want. It is clear they have a good idea what that is.
Get back to me when I can trust the communist supervisors more than what little I already trust our current leadership.
I don't use Verizon. Plus this is the first I've heard of either change. I have something to tell my Verizon using friends now. They'll probably be livid since I doubt they know either.
Here's the link to opt out for your home internet:
http://www22.verizon.com/foryourhome/myaccount/protected/account/MyAccountGeography.aspx
Uhm.. well it's simple, nobody reads those things, and they know it. You should know it too.
I'm not outraged because I don't care about this data. They can collect it all they want.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
URLs are content of communication, not addressing information. In a one-party consent state, Verizon can easily argue that this information is now allowed as they have the "consent" of the customers.
But what about two-party consent states? Does Verizon have consent from every web site?
I'm kind of annoyed that the Galaxy S doesn't come with a firewall built in.
It looks like I'll have to root my phone, and risk bricking it, just to use the iptables functionality via Droidwall or similar. I still don't understand why these key Linux functions are not readily available.
Speaking of rooting, why doesn't the Android OS give the user the option to gain root access? sudo even?
Meanwhile, I look forward to the day when your droid can be configured to use VPN / TOR / HTTPS / local DNS / etc that we have come to know, love and expect from Linux.
I know, it's early days yet. I know, this functionality can cost CPU cycles and can drain the battery... and these new phones are quite power hungry.
What I'd really like is to be able to install a mobile proxy service on my home server, and have my phone always get pages via my home server. Same service that the current range of browsers provide, but secured by my own machine. This way the only information that my ISP can see is requests to and from my home machine.
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
Simple, the average customer does not read the ToS, nor do they care when they change. This will only change once ToS documents are reduced to 1 page max using 10pt Arial and not full of legalese that the average person doesn't understand.
~Syberz
Why is it a prerequisite to be religious to be president? Our country is screwed.
Because the separation of Church and State is upheld and enforced to the n'th degree.
Be sure to get all three separate options on that page.
And note that each of the three options is on a separate form. You can't just click "don't" on all three and click submit; you have to click "don't" to the first, submit using the button right under that, then click "don't" on the second, etc.
I don't understand why no company does the easy and beneficial thing: Praise the information sources!
If you opt-in to have your data mined and sold, $10 comes off of your bill every month. Or $5, or whatever. There will be plenty of people more than willing to do it and the rest? Well, they don't get the benefit money.
It took literally less than 2 minutes to exercise my right to tell them they don't have the default right to invade my privacy. Made one call (1-866-211-0874), typed in one of the cell numbers on our account and our billing pass code and it let me opt-out for all of the lines (hit "2"). Considering how easy it was, I'm assuming they outsources the system design. Verizon never makes things that simple.
Bark less. Wag more.
Time for the EFF to become a customer of these "services" from verizon, google, facebook, etc. Then they can start a daily report called "Browsing Habits of the 1% and Their Families." Throw in a few demographic reports on the top 10% broken down by zip code, or by political affiliation. Re-tweet the top words and phrases on twitter from the topmost identifiable household income levels. That might get a reaction.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
Verizon claims they can use this for targeted mobile advertising. How would they deliver that advertising? The only ads I see on my phone are on web pages. Is Verizon going to modify web pages to deliver different targeted ads? Perhaps now I see why they didn't want network neutrality to apply to wireless networks...
How information will be used:
To make mobile ads you see more relevant.
Description:
When you use your wireless device, you often see ads on websites and apps. Using certain Consumer Information
(such as your Demographics, device type, and language preference) and the postal address we have for you, we will determine whether you fit within an audience an advertiser is trying to reach. This means ads you see may be more relevant to you. We will not share any information that identifies you personally. A local restaurant may want to advertise only to people who live within 10 miles, and we might help deliver that ad on a website without sharing information that identifies you personally.
(emphasis mine)
IMHO Verizon did a good job with this change. They sent me an email a couple of weeks ago letting me know about the changes. The email was very concise and clear. They listed exactly what they wanted the information for and what they were going to do with it. They even gave examples. For example, they made it clear that they were going to use location information to provide context specific advertisements.
Most importantly, the steps for opting out were very explicit and easy to follow. They went so far as to explain how my services would be impacted if I opted out. In short, I will not receive "relevant" context specific ads. Oh noes, teh horrorz!
There is not much to be outraged about when the changes are communicated ahead of time and you have the opportunity to opt out. Verizon is not Facebook. They did not just push out a change and try to hide it.
How can an ISP sell my info if they don't know who the info belongs too? Were told the data they collect doesn't collect personal or identifiable data. My personal data is my name,street address,telephone,and anything installed or stored on my computer. So they are collecting that i surf porn,woodworking,3D modeling,Pencil drawing web sites. So my question is just what are they selling? and to whom and for how much. Because what they say they dont collect that data must be dam worthless.
Jack of all trades,master of none