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AT&T To End Targeted Ads Program, Give All Users Lowest Available Price

Posted by msmash on from the good-things dept.

AT&T has confirmed to ArsTechnica that it is getting rid of Internet Preferences, a controversial program that analyzed home internet customers' web browsing habits in order to serve some targeted ads. From the report:"To simplify our offering for our customers, we plan to end the optional Internet Preferences advertising program related to our fastest Internet speed tiers," an AT&T spokesperson said. "As a result, all customers on these tiers will receive the best rate we have available for their speed tier in their area. We'll begin communicating this update to customers early next week." Data collection and targeted ads will be shut off, AT&T also confirmed. Since AT&T introduced Internet Preferences for its GigaPower fiber Internet service in 2013, customers had to opt into the traffic scanning program in order to receive the lowest available rate. Customers who wanted more privacy had to pay another $29 a month for standalone Internet access; bundles including TV or phone service could cost more than $60 extra when customers didn't opt in.

44 comments

  1. In their area.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    will receive the best rate we have available for their speed tier in their area.

    How about we just make it illegal to price a product differently just because they have no competition in certain areas, while others have lots.

    One price per tier, across the country, regardless of competition...

    1. Re:In their area.... by sims+2 · · Score: 1

      At&t business 12Mbps ADSL2+ is $45/mo here in sallisaw oklahoma ($50/mo without bundling phone) what's it cost where you live?...

      What! it signs me in using my ip now?!! on a business account?!

      --
      Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
    2. Re:In their area.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It costs a shit ton more to roll out fiber to some areas compared to others.

    3. Re:In their area.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Still cheaper than paying to maintain the copper network.

    4. Re:In their area.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > One price per tier, across the country, regardless of competition...

      All that will happen will be marginally different tiers in different areas with different prices.

    5. Re:In their area.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's called overhead, and if you'd stop to think, the areas with competition are most likely to be the places where they charge the least, but have the highest infrastructure costs...

    6. Re: In their area.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You could have 100 people on 1 mile of Fiber instead of 5 in rural America.

  2. "receive the best rate we have available" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    uh, huh. good one.

    1. Re:"receive the best rate we have available" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      see above - https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9720621&cid=52989035

  3. Bullshit. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What's the catch? There's no way there isn't at least one catch here.

    What are they actually planning?

    1. Re:Bullshit. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      see 2 above - https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9720621&cid=52989035

    2. Re:Bullshit. by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 1

      BS. There's a HUGE difference between "one rate per tier across the country" and "the best rate we have available for their speed tier in their area."

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
    3. Re:Bullshit. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yep.
      The difference is it cost them more to administer the program then they earned by gouging the few who didn't press for the best rate.

    4. Re:Bullshit. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That was sort of the point to my post. Until they're only allowed to charge one rate, sort of like Cellular plans, country wide, there will be no pressure to lower the rates in areas that have no competition.

      If they can only charge 1 rate, across the nation, then pressure from areas with competition will drive down the national rate.

    5. Re:Bullshit. by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 1

      The "one rate across the nation" will never happen. Some states are less densely populated. And Hawaii? Everything is more expensive there..

      --
      "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
  4. Are they getting rid of the packet inspection? by clonehappy · · Score: 2

    Or are they just silently applying it to everyone, and getting rid of the target ads and the opt-out so no one actually knows they're being tracked?

    1. Re:Are they getting rid of the packet inspection? by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Packet inspection is non-monetizable without a product.

      Typically, data collection warehouses categorize and aggregate demographics information. That is to say: businesses don't sell your name and address; they sell the service of identifying preferences among demographics, demographics in an area, and likely market penetration when targeting a demographic in an area. Without all the arbitrary big words: they tell you how the population responds to certain products, services, and ideals, where that population is, and how big it is, and then you can target an area (a city) or a demographic (buy targeted ads aimed at a large, highly-responsive audience).

      Sifting through all that data is hard. It's a highly-specialized task, and businesses which do this as a service tend to build robust organizational knowledge: their employees get good at their jobs, share information among each other, and send it up to management to be packaged and distributed as standard operating procedure and training material. Asking them what the market looks like is a hell of a lot cheaper and provides much better results than getting their giant database of information and trying to analyze it yourself: your own people will suck payroll while spending excessive amounts of time digging around in it, scratching their heads, making up arbitrary queries that seem obvious, and then produce *a* result--instead of identifying the goals and then immediately and systematically producing an analysis strategy that produces a *high-quality* result.

      AT&T probably has little vested interest in tracking your web behavior, and likely found ads weren't making them sufficient money for the infrastructure cost. They would have spent a lot of time looking at this, predicting the cost of scaling (which would improve ROI), and working out if the new ROI was likely to be significantly-higher and considerably profitable. They might have identified a small profit (e.g. 0.5% margin, or 0.01% of their existing profit, or the like) and decided that the risks (the likelihood of earning less and facing a loss as an aggregate over the long run) weren't worth it. They might have just identified that ads aren't going to make them money at all. In any case, they have little use for large-scale inspection now because it only puts them at risk (notably regulatory risk--you inspected this shit, how did you not know child porn was there?) with no likely profit.

      Even the ad networks that could use AT&T's theoretical tracking data can't make much use of it. They'd have to coalesce it with their data--which has to be robust, because they have to be able to actually track and identify users across the Web anyway--which is expensive and poor ROI if their data is already robust enough to match up to AT&T's data. There's a high likelihood that the attempt would actually pollute the ad network's mined data with erroneous data, since coalescing might not be anywhere near 100% accurate, and measuring the false-positive rate is impossible (if you could do it automatically, you wouldn't have false-positives; if you can do it manually, you're working with dozens of people's data rather than millions).

      --
      Support my political activism on Patreon.
    2. Re:Are they getting rid of the packet inspection? by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1

      This. We're in the post-Age-of-Information-age, and are now in the Age of Mass Surveillance. No way in hell they're not tracking every single thing their customers are doing, if for no other reason than to give all that data to FBI/CIA/DHS and who knows who else.

    3. Re:Are they getting rid of the packet inspection? by eionmac · · Score: 1

      Intrigued by your signature petition. Even in the U.K. where we have a universal 'social security' we have great difficulties in getting it to benefit the real areas of poverty as homelessness (no "ZIP Code" or our 'Post Code') makes form filling to get acceptance by government officials impossible.

      --
      Regards Eion MacDonald
    4. Re:Are they getting rid of the packet inspection? by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 1

      That Universal Social Security is based on the United States's $1.7 trillion (2013) spending on welfare, including Social Security old-age pensions, Social Security disability insurance, unemployment insurance, food security (SNAP, WIC), and housing assistance (HUD). There are some transitional considerations (grandfathering of Old-age pensions; continuation or reduction of state programs; etc.) to avoid disrupting the financial situation of households receiving current benefits; none of this causes a bump in taxes, although I keep the payroll OASDI tax (reduced a little) initially to support grandfathered recipients.

      It's based heavily on the U.S. government spending and tax policy, as well as retail costs of goods, risk cost, and theoretical models to supply services. The most important risk cost is landlord risk renting to low-incomes; this cost is reduced by making those incomes stable (fewer evictions, fewer empty units, thus rent per tenant doesn't have to cover as much of those costs), and there are other possible ways to reduce that more. The total amount of money in play is less than the current cost of welfare; no taxes are raised; and, when you consider displacement (i.e. the amount of money taken and given to someone else--if you pay $7,000 and get $5,000 back, that's $2,000 displaced to someone else), it's $1 trillion USD cheaper.

      So, it's heavily-engineered for the U.S. The U.K. might be able to pull off similar; you'd have to start over, but you can follow the same development process I used and adjust it.

      The whole thing is based on national wealth--that is, GDP per capita. In 1900, the median-income U.S. household spent 40% of its income on food; thanks to technical progress reducing the labor involved in making food, the median-income household now spends around 11% on food. Globalization has allowed us to purchase goods from countries whose industry can produce said goods cheaper, which has increased our local retailing and shipping jobs; we've shifted agricultural jobs to manufacture jobs, and now to doctors and IT workers. If the U.S. tried to implement my plan in 1950--when welfare cost 1.28% of all income (it costs 17% now)--they'd have had to levy an ADDITIONAL 35% flat tax on all income; incomes in 1950 went up to 91%, so we'd have essentially made everyone very poor, possibly eliminated the income gap entirely, and collapsed before the USSR.

      Today, the U.S. can do it without actually raising the effective taxes on anyone.

      As for the meat of the thing? It's a form of Universal Basic Income.

      My Universal Social Security plan eliminates OASDI and adds a 17% USS tax on all income (business and personal). This actually lowers the business income tax by roughly 4.5% marginal (from 40% to around 35.5%), and eliminates the OASDI payroll tax (6.2% of wages paid--that is: we currently penalize businesses for employing workers rather than machines, and I put a stop to that). The top tax brackets don't increase; and everyone along the way from the bottom up ends up with more spendable income (thus, effectively, less taxes). It replaces HUD housing assistance, unemployment, and food stamps; however, assistance programs remain in effect for children of low-income households.

      Every adult (age 18+; in the future, I would make this 16+) receives an equal share of that income. It's collected out of normal withholding, which is taken every two weeks or twice per month (the IRS allows businesses to select from either of two schedules) and stored in the Social Security Trust Fund. Each year, the prior year's totals are used to calculate the new payment. Over time, the buying power of this payout per-adult actually increases (see above discussion about 1900 vs 2015 food cost, and 1950 vs 2015 required tax funding); in recessions with high unemployment, it would decrease, and so the initial conditions have been tuned to survive a new 200

      --
      Support my political activism on Patreon.
  5. The other problem AT&T had... by QuietLagoon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...Customers who wanted more privacy had to pay another $29 a month..

    Once AT&T put a price on customer privacy ($29 per month) then, if AT&T were ever found violating customer privacy, the cost to settle would start at $29 per month per customer involved. imo, AT&T's legal department did not want to have a specific cost placed on customer privacy.

  6. $29/mo for Privacy? by SandwhichMaster · · Score: 1

    "Customers who wanted more privacy had to pay another $29 a month for standalone Internet access"

    That's insane. Internet shouldn't cost that much alone. At an extra $29/mo, they're forcing your hand to accept the invasion of privacy as a way of life.

  7. Somehow I suspect... by ripvlan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...that they scanned all users data no matter what. It's just that some people were willing to pay a large sum of money to pretend it wasn't happening.

    I also suspect SSL is making it harder for them to learn anything.

    1. Re:Somehow I suspect... by LordSkippy · · Score: 1

      I also suspect SSL is making it harder for them to learn anything.

      This. Google defaults to encrypted, they can't see what you're searching for on the worlds most popular search engine.

      --
      My karma is in a nose dive
    2. Re:Somehow I suspect... by birukun · · Score: 1

      They will not allow you to use your own DNS settings on your router, so they are collecting that data.

      One reason why I switched to cable.

      I miss the latency though..... DSL was 5ms and cable is around 20 ms in my area. Great for FPS games.

      --
      Self Defense - A Human Right www.a-human-right.com
    3. Re:Somehow I suspect... by ewhenn · · Score: 1

      How do they manage to lock you out for your own router? By "own router" I mean a router that you either purchased or built yourself.

    4. Re:Somehow I suspect... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because the FCC is so corrupt they will believe AT&T when it says that filtering DNS traffic requested by the subscriber is entirely "reasonable network management". Because corruption. Same as it ever was. If the FCC wasn't corrupt, it wouldn't be AT&T ending this program. It would be the DOJ.

    5. Re:Somehow I suspect... by Woldscum · · Score: 1

      HTTPS Everywhere

      https://www.eff.org/https-ever...

  8. That's unusual by Jodka · · Score: 3, Insightful

    About the recently defunct AT&T ad program: there are innumerable little such bullshit annoyances which businesses create for customers because it's part of the of the superstition and business culture to assume without question that whatever fraction of a percent of increased revenue they generate merits the frustration which they cause customers.

    It's like those sale signs in the grocery store, "Sale, two for [some price]." You stand there, wasting time reading the sign, trying to figure out if you actually have to buy two to get the discount or if you just buy one do you still get a discounted price. Make this easier for everyone and state the sale price of just one, assholes. Of course the people making those labels believe they will cause customers to buy more if they suggest to do that, despite whatever inconvenience that creates when discovering the sales policy for smaller quantities. When I see those signs now, I think to myself, "well, fuck you too," and then shop at Costco and order from Amazon to avoid the bullshit. It is important to attune your senses to such corporate marketing and sales crap and then subvert or work around it; The expansion of corporate bullshit annoyance depends on customers not consciously recognizing and accounting for its burden.

    The encrustation of that kind of crap has grown to such levels because customers are not consciously aware of the burden. But because its absence is psychologically uplifting, they respond positively with dollars when it is purged. Remember all those other web search engines which Google totally crushed? Their home pages loaded up with advertising? Then Google defied the convention of crowding ever-more advertising into the search page and displayed only their logo and the search box, and minimal, discrete related advertising in search results. And it was good. And the design genius of the Steve Jobs and the award-winning, insanely-high-sales-revenue-per-square-foot Apple Stores? Actually very simple formula: It's just stuff you want to buy sitting out on tables to look at and then purchase. The glass and wood and stone is cool, but it is slight-of-hand. The real reason the stores work is because of the absence of store bullshit. Stuff you want to buy sitting on tables to look at. Absolute genius.

    --
    Ceci n'est pas une signature.
  9. Hopefully the beginning of the end. by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Targeted ads are just another opportunity to rip off people by showing them different prices for the same thing. Sort of like how Coke wanted to have vending machines that would raise the price when it was hot outside.

    The problem with targeted ads, of course, is that it only takes a quick search to find a better deal if what they're offering you isn't competitive. Anyone remember how for a while big-box electronic stores that offered to price match, when you went to show them the ad on their computer system, the price was higher than what you had seen at home a few hours before, because the stores would serve dummy clones of their competitors with higher prices? Had to stop once browsing over the cell network became practical, as long as you didn't use their wi-fi.

    --
    "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
  10. neat, plausible, and wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    > One price per tier, across the country, regardless of competition...

    Beware of unintended consequences. They could easily respond to that by pulling out of any market where there is competition, because those are much fewer than the markets where they have monopoly power. Better to give up a minority of their least profitable customers than stop ripping off the majority of their customers. An exit like that would also leave the remaining ISP free to raise their rates since they no longer have any competition.

    I'm not defending ATT, I'm just reminding you of H.L Mencken's wise words: "There is always a well-known solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong."

  11. I can just imagine the call... by wardrich86 · · Score: 3, Funny

    I imagine if it were a letter, it would look like this:

    "Dear $Customer:

    We have been ripping you off for years, and have finally decided to make things right (sort of). As of $Date we will be adjusting your price to the lowest price in your area ($area). Sure, our services are still available cheaper in other areas, but what are you going to do about it? Move houses?

    Sincerely,
    AT&T, where customers come first*

    *If they live in the right area"

    1. Re:I can just imagine the call... by JustNiz · · Score: 2

      >> As of $Date we will be adjusting your price to the lowest price in your area ($area).

      You forgot something: "..which for you will mean an increase of an extra $localizedSupplyAndDemandFactor per month"

  12. Couldn't make money, time for customer service by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The program will be back shortly with the next MBA.

  13. LOL by p51d007 · · Score: 1

    "Give" the lowest price to our customers. AT&T? Anyone buying that!

  14. NYC more expensive than Dallas by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 1

    Some areas of the country are more expensive because of labor costs, land costs, or other reasons. Now, that said, you can make it illegal to price differently because of competition. But the best way to do that is to have local commissions set rates or similar.

    --
    Your ad here. Ask me how!
  15. Because Most People Aren't Stupid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And go with another provider

  16. AT&T has high-speed? by TigerPlish · · Score: 1

    Really? My fastest AT&T DSL in the good days when I was a 1/4 mile to a DSLAM was a whopping 6Mbps.

    Then I moved - six years ago - to bumfuck western edge of southeast Florida, and the best AT&T could do was 1.5.. on a good day.

    I tossed AT&T out for everything except mobile and put internet on my existing tv comcast ripoff. At least it's fast..

    I had no idea AT&T had such a low-handed program.

    Thieves.. all of them.. I'm atheist but there's a saying back home.. "They'll steal the nails from the cross." Back then it was mostly colorful metaphor. Not all businesses were crooks. Now it seems they are.

    --
    The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
  17. Best ad & online threat blocker by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit https://www.google.com/search?...

    Ads rob speed, security (malvertising) & privacy (tracking).

    Hosts add speed (hardcodes/adblocks), security (bad sites/poisoned dns), reliability (dns down), & anonymity (dns requestlogs/trackers) natively.

    Works vs. caps & PUSH ads.

    Avg. page = big as Doom http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... & ads = 40% of it.

    Hosts != ClarityRay blockable (vs. souled-out to admen inferior wasteful redundant slow usermode addons)

    Less power/cpu/ram + IO use vs. DNS/routers/addons/antivirus (slows you) + less security issues/complexity.

    Compliments firewalls (blocking less used IP addys vs. hosts blocking more used domains) & DNS (lightens dns load).

    Gets data via 10 security sites.

    APK

    P.S. - Safe https://www.virustotal.com/en/... (Verified by Malwarebytes' S. Burn "seen the code & it's safe" http://forum.hosts-file.net/vi... )