Soon if you value your privacy at all, you'll have to pay for it.
If you have AT&T’s gigabit Internet service and wonder why it seems so affordable, here's the reason—AT&T is boosting profits by rerouting all your Web browsing to an in-house traffic scanning platform, analyzing your Internet habits, then using the results to deliver personalized ads to the websites you visit, e-mail to your inbox, and junk mail to your front door.Signing up for AT&T's "GigaPower" fiber-to-home service automatically "opts you in" to AT&T's ironically titled "Internet Preferences" program. As detailed by Jon Brodkin in the ArsTechnica article linked above, this default "opt-in" gives the company "permission" to scan every aspect of your web use, essentially tracking your keystrokes for every site that you visit. The "service" operates independent of your browser's privacy settings. You have to pay between $30-60 a month (depending on whether you've included phone service in your plan), or up to $744 dollars a year to extricate yourself from AT&T's pitiless gaze:
AT&T says Internet Preferences tracks "the webpages you visit, the time you spend on each, the links or ads you see and follow, and the search terms you enter.”AT&T says this "tracking" assists their advertisers in serving up targeted ads based on each user's personal "preferences." These include web-based and ads that arrive in both your email and snail mailboxes (and presumably ads from telemarketers as well). The ads include not only the services of the advertisers, but ads from businesses either in proximity to certain locations (such as travel destinations) or with a peripheral relationship to the ad you may have "visited."AT&T charges at least another $29 a month ($99 total) to provide standalone Internet service that doesn’t perform this extra scanning of your Web traffic. The privacy fee can balloon to more than $60 for bundles including TV or phone service. Certain modem rental and installation fees also apply only to service plans without Internet Preferences.
AT&T contends it "informs" its customers of the web scanning in its promotional materials relating to "GigaPower." As shown in the article (which contains a slideshow closely analyzing AT&T's ads for "GigaPower"), the language informing the clueless purchaser that he/she is forever forfeiting his privacy is not provided to the recipient until several clicks in to the promotion. The user is then subliminally "urged" to purchase the service that includes the surveillance/tracking, as the interface emphasizes the lower price if he does, emphasizes the higher prices if he doesn't, and also forces the user to re-do the entire process if he doesn't want the tracking service imposed on him. There are additional incentives such as a three-year price guarantee if one "opts" to allow himself to be tracked. In other words, the process is quite deliberate and geared to force the purchaser into agreeing.
The article notes that the company has bent over backwards to establish the legality of this practice through "reasonable disclosure" to the user of what it is doing to him. As Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Staff Attorney Le Tien notes, AT&T spent a lot of time and money on lawyers thinking just about that fact: “The reason legally it's important is under federal law it won't be unlawful for them to look at this stuff if you consent to them looking at it.”
The methodology through which AT&T imposes its "Internet Preferences" program suggests usage of what EEF's Technologists term "Deep Packet Inspection:"
This is the one time when the post office analogy works pretty well for the Internet, when you're transmitting data back and forth it has some header information that describes where it's going. It might say roughly what the contents are. You could think of it as media mail vs. parcel post vs. first class or something… These are the sorts of things that show up in the headers that ISPs usually look at when they're figuring out where to send your traffic.AT&T won't say whether they're using "Deep Packet Inspection."But deep packet inspection is as if the post office would open up your mail and look at the letters or look at, ‘what does this package contain. Look, he ordered a new Xbox from Amazon or something like that, maybe he wants to buy an Xbox game now, so let's show him ads for that.' It really is about looking at the inside of the content of your communications.
Corporate conglomerate sites that provide a "service" such as Facebook and Google have already convinced a gadget-doped public into accepting the proposition that they should be allowed to track their web usage since their business models rely on advertising. But the entry of an ISP into the data collection business raises new alarms among privacy advocates, because it points to a trend of monetizing the entire internet and transforming the conduits that underlie the Internet into vast, unaccountable personal data collectors:
“If people go to Facebook or Google or Pinterest or whatever and they search for consumer stuff, there is a common expectation that the business model is funded by ads. I think everybody recognizes that,” White said. “But when I'm at home and I go to WebMD… there is a strong expectation that my ISP is the transport layer and not trying to monetize that. I think it's very different. I think it's a very dangerous place to go when consumer websites that are ad-driven become the model our basic Internet connectivity is based on.”The article describes the various data that could be gleaned through AT&T's program, including age, gender, race, data, medical conditions, and most notably, psychological traits and "personal interests." This data can be imputed to household members of the user. And "since Web browsing histories carry detailed insight, it may be possible to create other versatile analyses." The data collected are distinctly more personal than that traditionally permitted even under the ISPs' so-called "privacy policies," which (at least theoretically) rely on more aggregate, and less personalized examination of your web usage.
It's become a popular conception that the Internet offers no privacy whatsoever anymore, that users of the Internet have no right to expect that their usage will not be scrutinized. This easy capitulation deliberately ignores the coercive role of telecommunications corporations in imposing a surveillance ethic upon all of us as the "new normal." As the ArsTechnica article demonstrates, the marketing of the tools of surveillance has been calculated and deceptive, with a knowing sense of the public's vulnerability and lack of sophistication. Companies such as AT&T know that the people who sign up for these programs do so because they are cheaper and they won't think too much about the trade-off in personal privacy that they make when they purchase them; what is ultimately done with that data or who it is shared with; or the fact that their personal information, once collected, is retained forever by that corporation and never goes away. There are few ISP's available to Americans in the first place. The fact that AT&T has now placed a dollar value on "allowing" you to maintain your privacy, such that it is, is evidence of even more erosion of privacy rights, as other ISP's in search of ever-increasing profits are expected to follow suit.
This erosion of our rights was neither inevitable or necessary--it was imposed on us from the outset by the corporations who control the Internet in furtherance of their profits. Essentially these companies have found a way to profit on everyone's private information, all notions of personal privacy be damned.
AT&T hasn’t provided enough detail for experts to determine whether it’s really protecting customers’ privacy....We asked AT&T’s spokesperson if the company is willing to let its system be examined by privacy experts but did not receive an answer.Currently limited to specific metropolitan markets in Texas, North Carolina, and Missouri, for example, AT&T plans to expand its marketing of "GigaPower" services to "dozens" of major cities in the near future.