Carriers Selling Your Data: a $24 Billion Business (adage.com)

An anonymous reader writes: It goes without saying that cellphone carriers have access to tons of data about their subscribers. They have data about who you call, what sites you visit, and even where you're located. Now: "Under the radar, Verizon, Sprint, and other carriers have partnered with firms including SAP to manage and sell data." The article describes some of the ways this data is used by marketers: "The service also combines data from telcos with other information, telling businesses whether shoppers are checking out competitor prices on their phones or just emailing friends. It can tell them the age ranges and genders of people who visited a store location between 10 a.m. and noon, and link location and demographic data with shoppers' web browsing history. Retailers might use the information to arrange store displays to appeal to certain customer segments at different times of the day, or to help determine where to open new locations." Analysts estimate this fledgling industry to be worth about $24 billion to the carriers, and they project huge growth over the next several years. The carriers are trying to keep it a tightly held secret after seeing the backlash from the public in response to government snooping, which involves much less private data.

Comments

Profit from you

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course all this private data lets the marketers profit from you. It's you that ultimately pay for this. If they couldn't milk more profit by buying this data, then it wouldn't be worth buying!

$2 billion will be spent on elections this cycle, and a lot of that will be buying up the private data of candidates, their campaigners, their families to look for what papers they've read, what facts they're reviewed, and so on. Choicepoint is still there under a different name, still analyzing your vote, and demographic and looking for ways to skew the vote. Now it has access to everything from your purchases to your movements, who you are with, etc.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChoicePoint

And the $10 billion dollar gorilla in the room.... the NSA. If you *consent* to the sale by clicking an EULA you never read, then who needs to redefine laws? They are simply buying the data just like Bob the sleezy marketer.

And if Congress wants to pass privacy laws.... all those actors will oppose it behind the scenes.

You Are Always the Product

[ohnocitizen]

When we hear about free services snooping on you, people are quick to say "Free service? You are the product" and "not surprised". Yet we pay our telcos (sometimes ridiculous sums of money), and we are STILL the product. And guess what? The degree to which we allow ANY company or government agency to snoop on us allows the rest to get away with more too. So if we want to take a stand to keep some shreds of privacy intact, we need to take a powerful pro-privacy stance. We need to punish ANY organization that goes too far invading privacy, and establish laws and regulations to give us teeth for when they violate that privacy. And we need to stop reacting to news of privacy violations with dull acceptance. We need to fight back and one of our best tools available is to campaign hard to regulate the industry.

Token Anonymization

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:

It "tells you where your consumers are coming from, because obviously the mobile operator knows their home location,"

SAP receives non-personally-identifiable, anonymized information from telcos,

If they know where you live, you aren't anonymous. This is yet another example of ineffective "token anonymization" so they can say its anonymized while laughing as they automatically de-anonymize it.

Again the question for presidential candidates:

[Anonymous Coward]

"What is your hypothetical administration going to do to end this nonsense of the federal government spying on it's citizens without a warrant when:
      1- Historical information shows clearly that incidents of crime and terrorism have not been reduced in a credible way by warrantless wiretapping of citizens.
      2- Warrantless wiretapping has lead to trials where the first and fourth amendment rights of the defendants has been largely ignored
      3- Evidence collected by warrantless wiretapping of citizens has been used to support charges against said defendants despite their rights being violated.
      4- Spying on citizens CLEARLY represents a waste of taxpayer dollars that could be spent on using said resources to fight terrorism.
      5- Repeated spying on defendants such as Aaron Schwartz, has lead to situations where the very people who are experts that could contribute to the improvement of the use of surveillance where it is warranted in a fair and lawful way are victimized ,turning the US into a "Surveillance State" where anyone with any level of technical sophistication wants nothing to do with contributing their expertise to the betterment of said society.
      And finally:
      6- Any credible polling of the American public indicates that constituents of both major political parties clearly DO NOT WANT to live in a surveillance state?"
Ask Donald Trump, Ask Hillary Clinton, ask Bernie Sanders etc.. and watch them stumble and hone and haw or watch them go into some circular non-sequitur argument about "Well I love America and those people who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear and we are trying to prevent 9-11, thats right Nine Eleven! Nine Eleven was bad!" and other tired old clap trap.

This situation is unacceptable, and you don't stay in business by screwing over your customers.

This is equivalent to

[presidenteloco]

If the old-school telephone companies hired people to listen in to your phone calls then sold the info to the highest bidder.
Or the post office routinely steaming open the envelopes of your letters and selling the info, or using it to extort you.

If this sh*t ain't against the law it should be.

They're a common carrier and nothing more. Get off my lawn.