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Verizon Draws Fire For Monitoring App Usage, Browsing Habits
An anonymous reader writes "'We're able to view just everything that they do,' Bill Diggins, U.S. chief for the Verizon Wireless marketing initiative, told an industry conference earlier this year. 'And that's really where data is going today. Data is the new oil.' From the article: 'The company this month began offering reports to marketers showing what Verizon subscribers are doing on their phones and other mobile devices, including what iOS and Android apps are in use in which locations. Verizon says it may link the data to third-party databases with information about customers' gender, age, and even details such as "sports enthusiast, frequent diner or pet owner."'"
Even more opportunity for me to get offers for things I REALLY DON'T NEED.
Verizon's the first, but watch Google and others to follow now that it's mainstreamed. We're all going to get put into consumer categories based on our online activities:
sports fan, shoe fetish, gear head, porn enthusiast
These will match up to categories of products which we will then see repeatedly everywhere we go until we get so paranoid we buy them just to feel normal.
It's like minority report, but as a for-profit business instead of a pre-crime intervention.
Verizon Wireless says that its initiative, called Precision Market Insights, is legal because the information is aggregated and doesn't reveal customers' identities.
The thought of "ethical" or "good for the customers" isn't in their vocabulary, is it?
If they found the legal loophole that allowed literally ass-raping customers to make extra money, they'd use it the same day.
Mr Reese, I have a new number for you. This one is about to go buy a KFC. You have 15 mins to get there before he does and make sure he buys McDonalds.
OK Mr Finch, how do you suggest I persuade him? The M16 or the AK47?
Doesn't help you if what they're monitoring and analyzing is your upstream data traffic.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
I guess I'll start getting ads for porn sites.
... whose president, a couple of years ago, surprised some people announcing coldly that he was there exclusively to 'provide receptive brain time to ads', and nothing else...
A receptive brain provider, in his own french terms: 'fournisseur de cerveau disponible'.
The TV indeed you can choose not to have; the GSM seems a bit harder.
Maybe the solution is to separate functions: having a minimal-but-tetherable phone, and pair it with a small tablet that you (may?) control better, or at least whose data won't immediately belong to the phone supplier?
I for one use a Blackberry Playbook (walled garden, but no relation to the A/G duopoly, and there does exist a couple of ad-filtering browsers), after trying to wait till the first Linux tablet...
Herve S.
...Verizon would be receiving an anti-trust conviction a few hours after admitting something like this.
When Congress granted US telcos immunity in 2008 it set this up then. Now they think they can act with impunity and are above the law. And they know, if they happen to be breaking the law, nobody will go to jail, no penalties will be paid, they'll just sponsor a few Congresscritters and any snooping will be legalized.
I also wonder if this is deep packet inspection only, because what Apps your using would only work if those apps were cloud services. However there is a piece of spyware that was installed on US phones, Android, iPhone and Windows Phones, Carrier IQ, which did have the ability to monitor app usage on the phone itself.
So I wonder if we aren't seeing the result of that spyware on the phone.
That's too easy
Geeks like to do things twice as hard and five times as long
Need more TOR! https://guardianproject.info/apps/orbot/
There should be a limit on the number of details that can be linked.
Yes, and that number should be zero. If I'm paying for the service, they have no moral right to be selling my data, anonymized or not, nor do they have a right to link it to third-party databases. And they especially have no moral right to use that data to engage in targeted advertising. Fuck those leeches and fuck the tide of slime they rode in on. And fuck the politicians who have sold us out to the highest bidder by legalizing this kind of thing.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
How do you know?
Verizon has its own definition of 'unlimited' why would they not do the same for 'opt-out'?
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Wasn't there supposed to be some modicum of privacy afforded to the end-users by the networks if all they did was run a comm-channel? I guess the retro-active pardoning of the telco-spying on all customers turned the notion of privacy inside-out. So along with goggle's staring at you at all of your port-80 traffic with doubleclicks and javascript and others using flash-based cookies, you've got to worry about eaves-dropping of all of your activity over you communications channels.
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I'm sure that "our" express consent is buried somewhere in the fine-print of the ever-changeable-when-they-want-to user agreements. That concept of one-sided ability of the service provided to change the terms of the usage-agreement at any time and without notice has to be the most odious of the gotchas that exist in this world. I'm not face-booking because they change their privacy policy as often as possible and always reset the privacy settings to show-the-world-everything-including-your-undies every time they update anything like timeline.
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Can the Public Utilities Commission do anything about this? or are cell-phone/wireless plans beyond the scope of the PUCs?
What level of access do they have? I need details explaining more. Can they see what you are doing when you are on a cellular network, or when you are on wifi too.
Can they see what you are doing when you are using private browsing? Are they capturing passwords and storing them? Is the device pushing back secure information to them?
Does a VPN prevent tracking?
I expect some things when using a cellphone. Having them essentially listen in on all my communication or interaction with others is not one of them.
I don't hear my wife complaining...
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There's crossing the line, and then there's blowing past it in a rocket car while going for the world land speed record.
Did you every think when you were younger, if you remember before the Internet, that your phone company would listen in on your conversations, analyze them word for word, tally them up and present them to advertisers in neat little charts?
The government does that? Heck I'm not doing anything wrong.
The utility does it for profit? Mmmm.. no.
The hulking sasquatch in the corner is that you can in fact find out things about people, or even more easily, about tiny groups of interest, even if you have stripped the caller data. And what if one of your marketing customers has written some finely targeted apps, for which they buy the report? It may be quite easy to integrate the additional data with what they have already got.
...good thing I no longer use their image.
I'm sure they're still monitoring my data, but I doubt cyanogenmod sends them info on my app usage.
I just wish the CM team would make an INC 2 image past 7. Despite the fact their news posts claim they support it, I've yet to see one.
I've tried the unofficial builds but they haven't played well with my phone, the last one i tried sent my battery into overdrive.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
VPN proxy. I think every smartphone has that built-in.
Of course, it doesn't stop them from pulling location data or calling patterns. Unless you install a VoIP app and use that.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
VPN to your home PC, access Tor through that. Orbot is also an alternative, but you lose some anonymity / plausible deniability ("No, that was relay traffic. I wasn't using Tor at the time that really bad thing happened") by not running as a relay (which would be expensive on a limited data plan).
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Yes, and that number should be zero. If I'm paying for the service, they have no moral right to be selling my data, anonymized or not, nor do they have a right to link it to third-party databases. And they especially have no moral right to use that data to engage in targeted advertising. Fuck those leeches and fuck the tide of slime they rode in on. And fuck the politicians who have sold us out to the highest bidder by legalizing this kind of thing.
Their response: "If you don't like it, feel free to get the fuck off of our network. kthxbai!"
If you need their service, you accept their terms. Do you need their service? Be sure to look up a definition of the word "need" before you answer.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Uh? can't you even vote with your wallet ? drop Verizon and get a new contract with some other carrier ?
Opting out doesn't mean anything to me. Ok so I opt-out of them selling my information; unless I missed it, nothing on that opt-out page said anything about stopping all of their data collection. What guarantee do I have that they're not going to sell my information anyways? So I move a few radio buttons around and they stay there when I refresh the page; what stops them from distributing that information anyways? They don't have any ethics to begin with. They'll happily change someone's plan mid-contract and tell them too-bad.
They have just as much "moral right" to discuss their customer's habits as their customers have to discuss their habits, as is happening in this very discussion on /. If you're paying for service, part of the cost of providing that service may be subsidized by selling info which has value.
They disclose what they do with the info and offer an "opt-out" (may need to be a customer to view that page) and if you don't trust that, no one is forcing you to use their services.
"Moral" doesn't mean what you think it means.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
My contract with AT&T ends in December. Now I can scratch Verizon off the list. Now which company DOESN'T do this?
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
has she been properly bindered?
just asking questions, that's all.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The solution is to only use encrypted services. If your fav site or does not encrypt ask the provider to add that option.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I used to be able to VPN to home on my old carrier.
More recently I attempted, and neither PPTP and L2TP worked. I'm still investigating for other causes, but I wouldn't be surprised to find it's blocked.
Rather than ignoring the postcards that guarantee me a whopping $10 in the settlement, I might actually file my own claim just to be a jerk. I'm big on privacy and if this is true, I wouldn't be unhappy to see them run into the ground for this.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Do what I do - default ringtone - silence. Default vibration - off. Add in your real known contacts, group them, and give them a ringtone - more than one if you prefer. Now remain blissfully uninterrupted by all those "unknowns" etc. They'll leave voicemail if they're important and not in your contact list. That takes care of being bothered by robo-call asshats and the like.
Next, delete your FB, Twitter, and other crap social accounts. Disconnect. You don't need them, and won't miss them, especially if your friends aren't tied to them either. Drop other apps that use any of these services, although since you're no longer connected, your targeted ads will quickly become rather random. (It's best to uninstall, clean, and reinstall such apps, as they do tend to have ID data in them, and FB especially is notorious for never deleting anything. You might want to even wipe the phone and start over)
After all this, you'll still be identifiable, but at least you won't be linked to accounts in other data mining company services. With the VPN option, you can even reduce some of this additional tracking, but, unless you root your phone and do a custom install, you'll never really be sure of exactly what's being kept.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Have gnu, will travel.
"'We're able to view just everything that they do,' Bill Diggins, U.S. chief for the Verizon Wireless marketing initiative, told an industry conference earlier this year.
All I have to say is that guy better have a huge jock strap. The size of his balls must be staggering to make a comment like that.
1) A lot of corporations use Verizon as the carrier for their company-owned cell phones; depending on who uses what apps and phones, this data mining could easily be construed as corporate espionage, as well as national security risk. Example: Defense contracting company who uses AutoCAD Mobile app to share top-secret designs among their engineers.
2) Albeit spoken by a true, obvious d-bag, the statement "data is the new oil" is a damn fine analogy IMO. Why, you may ask? Because no one gets to mine oil off my property without paying me for usage rights, and my data should be under the same consideration. Not only should mining my data for for-profit purposes require my explicit permission, it should also require fair compensation (fair to me, not Verizon).
Someone who's a better writer than me needs to draft up a letter to Congresscritters that we can all copy/paste to indicate our chagrin.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I'd love to have a smartphone, but on the other hand, I value not being sold to advertisers like a slab of meat even more.
Seems to me the only thing that makes this data valuable is the fact that the buyers assume it is pure - meaning, that they think that your browsing habits actually reflect your interests and purchasing habits. I know I've seen talk of this before but why not simply have an app that randomly runs arbitrary apps and browses arbitrary pages in order to contaminate the data? If all of Verizon's users browsing habits looked similar from using such an app and it was well known that the data was not actually representative of the user, Verizon would essentially be selling garbage. I find it unlikely advertisers would pay good money for garbage.
Verizon just uses DNS hijacking to record your sites.
So the easy solution is to use Norton, Open, or Comodo DNS. They also offer malware and phishing protection as well. do that and your computer wont be sniffed. The IP addresses do not mean anything without a DNS record to correspond.
http://saveie6.com/
Pay attention to this site:
http://www.privacysos.org/blog thank you
Interestingly, Tim Wu, in his most excellent book, Master Switch, explains how the original AT&T has recombined to its original corporate form (only bigger and more powerful with all the acquisitions when it was ostensibly "broken up"). The one supposed exception is Verizon, but following the circuitous ownership of Verizon through many, many subsequent points of ownership, one finds the majority owner turns out to be GE, which was owned by the original owners of AT&T (Rockefeller & Morgan) --- so who is really the owner of the entire shebang???? [probably still Morgan and Rockefeller families]
Hmmm....so, what's this Business Round Table???
http://publicintelligence.net/business-roundtable/
So who's on it?
Ivan G. Seidenberg, Chairman, Chairman & CEO, Verizon Communications
Randall L. Stephenson, At-large member, Chairman & CEO, AT&T Inc.
Jeffrey R. Immelt (Jeff), At-large member, Chairman & CEO, General Electric Company
I'm sure the opt-out will be 'honored' just like the DNT flag. Advertisers are such incredibly honest people after all.
So the easy solution is to use Norton, Open, or Comodo DNS. They also offer malware and phishing protection as well. do that and your computer wont be sniffed. The IP addresses do not mean anything without a DNS record to correspond.
The easy solution is to not have a smartphone. Seriously, I'm already tired from maintaining my security and privacy on my home/work PCs. Now I have to constantly fuck with my phone too? Not worth it.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
And In return, the public SHOULD have every right to tell them, "fine, now get out of our spectrum, kthxbai!".
If they need to use part of the public commons, they accept the public's terms. The public isn't even obligated to let them keep their corporate charter.
Verizon is hardly to blame for you not reading the contract you signed/agreed to, which says, in part
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
IT didn't teach the telecoms anything other then if they cooperate with the government they wouldn't be nickel and dime'd to death by lawsuits if the government fucks up.
Your statement is completely baseless and revolves around a paranoid fallacy that exists only under your tin foil hat.
That's too easy
Geeks like to do things twice as hard and five times as long
Right you are... That's why I'd add "then install firwall, tor, custom browser and e-mail client... then start tweaking settings" :D
How long did that take?
Can a person program a new solution to a problem? Why should anyone be able to stop such a thing? -Richard Stallman
Very good site!