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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.
...Verizon would be receiving an anti-trust conviction a few hours after admitting something like this.
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?
... 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...
Nothing surprising about that. TV networks sell Ads, but they buy programs.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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.
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/
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
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
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/
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.