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AT&T To Match Google Fiber In Kansas City, Charge More If You Want Privacy
An anonymous reader writes: When Google Fiber started bringing gigabit internet to cities around the U.S., we wondered how the incumbent ISPs would respond. Now we know: AT&T has announced they will match Google Fiber's gigabit offerings in Kansas City. Of course, there are some caveats. First, AT&T's rollout may stop as it fights the Obama administration over net neutrality. Not that it would be a nationwide rollout anyway: "AT&T does not plan to offer the ultra-fast Internet lines to every home in the market. Rather, he said the company would calculate where demand is strongest and the investment in stringing new cables promised a decent return."
There are also some interesting pricing concerns. The company plans to charge $70/month for gigabit service, but that's a subsidized price. Subsidized by what, you ask? Your privacy. AT&T says if you want to opt out of letting them track your browsing history, you'll have to pay $29 more per month. They say your information is used to serve targeted advertising, and includes any links you follow and search terms you enter.
There are also some interesting pricing concerns. The company plans to charge $70/month for gigabit service, but that's a subsidized price. Subsidized by what, you ask? Your privacy. AT&T says if you want to opt out of letting them track your browsing history, you'll have to pay $29 more per month. They say your information is used to serve targeted advertising, and includes any links you follow and search terms you enter.
Will they be blocking Tor for the cheaper service? It's cheaper to opt out with a VPN service than pay AT&T. And how will they capture my search terms on the cheap plan if I use https://www.google.com/ ? Do they have some agreement with Google to pass off search terms from an encrypted session?
It seems like something that would be easy to block, for those that know and care, and those that neither know, nor care, won't care.
Learn to love Alaska
On the contrary, apparently AT&T is fully on board with complete Title II provisions and are providing explicit examples of why we need Title II...and frankly splitting up every ISP into actual ISP companies and what the fuck ever else they want to be companies.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
A nice VPN is a great idea. The very idea that your privacy is worth such a pittance is really insulting.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
The weird thing is this type of traditional snooping will be defeated as more content providers are switching over to HTTPS. AT&T aren't technical dummies, so they know that. I'm wondering if their scheme doesn't require a special browser plugin that automates an MITM attack on https....
What's weirdest of all is that until now, federal law has protected the ISPs from liability over the content they transmit:
The rationale behind that statue was that ISPs can't be held accountable for copyright-infringing material going over their wires because filtering it would be too onerous. If AT&T sets up such a monitoring system, it pretty well defeats the claim they don't know what their subscribers are transmitting / receiving.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
At least AT&T is up front about it. Google does everything listed in the summary but they rely on nobody reading the fine print.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I'll take the cheaper one since they'll still be spying on you regardless. I don't care if they target ads to me because I don't pay attention to ads anyway. Cynical as I am I consider all advertising to be lies and ignore anything they have to say as total bullshit because......that's what it invariably is. I love Pepsi's ads, they blow the lame ones Coke has away, but I don't buy Pepsi because to me it tastes like shit. Ads are bullshit plain and simple. I don't get why gullible people believe and listen to lies like that.
I suspect you are exactly right. What AT&T is doing here is adopting googles policies / business practices and raising them by an order of magnitude. They are pushing it to the point where they are almost certain to get yelled at by the FCC, at which point they will point at Google and cry "but they get to do it, why can't we?".
They hope to make this whole "fast internet" thing unprofitable for Google so they will go away and let them rape the american public in peace. What AT&T understand is that Google isn't in the broadband business for (direct) profit. Google makes their money selling ads. They want you on a fast internet connection so you can run more searches and watch more youtube videos. The bandwidth limiting "caps" and other nonsense the incumbents have been up to lately have forced Google's hand. Much like their current Net Neutrality situation, these idiots did it to themselves.
It's sad to see a large company throw these temper tantrums. Pathetic might me a better word.
Unlike TOR or VPN, HTTPS doesn't hide everything. They can see where you are going, the hostname/ip and port. That alone says volumes about you.
Do you have any evidence of that? I mean evidence that they are monitoring the connection in some way and extracting information from your browsing habits.
Not sure if you are thinking of some shady folks in a room watchnig your personal traffic, but you can get the evidence for yourself in this manner:
Install noscript on your browser. Set it to not allow any scripts.
Now start going to random sites. First thing you'll notice is that some dont work correctly.
But now there is a little yellow bar across the bottom of your screen, and with a click or two you can see what is being blocked. First stop, you'll see Google analytics and some often some other google scripts. Then very often Facebook, who is tracking you whether you have a facebook account or not. Some other ad trackers as well - there are a lot of them.
So let's now temporarily allow all the scripts. Click. Now the page will reload. But just to annoy you, there are more scripts being blocked. Look at 'em if you want. More folks collecting data. Allow these ones temporarily, and you'll often find a third layer of scripts. I've found some times 30 or more little scripties reporting back to some place or another.
If you have a high threshhold for boredom, you can even look up who these folks are. There are a couple scripts that are completely innocuous, that deal with font rendering. But most want to know where you were, where you are, and where you are going.
That's just the scripts, not the hidden cookies - which you want something like "Better Privacy" for.
And that's just the ones we know about.
It's pretty obvious that every keystroke, every website we make or visit is monitored by something, Hell, if you try to use the net anonymously, you become interesting to some folks. I mainly use noscript and adblock as a way to make surfing tolerable. Privacy? Ain't happenin', and it's plain weird that AT&T is offering this discount to do what they are going to do to the "premium" subscribers too.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.