AT&T wants to monetize the data from this tracking device
Your smartphone knows a lot about you. It’s with you all the time. It knows which apps you use. It knows which websites you visit. And it knows your gender, your age, and even how fit you are. These are all things that advertisers would love to know about you, and smartphone companies are starting to give it to them. Verizon announced it would start bundling data about its customers in 2011 to provide audience “insights” and said in 2012 that it was going fabulously. It’s perhaps not surprising then that in its most recent privacy policy change, carrier competitor AT&T T +0.25% revealed that it wants to hop on the sell-information-about-our-users bandwagon too.
As noted by Fierce Wireless, a proposed change to AT&T’s privacy policy will allow the company to use customers’ wireless location information, “U-verse information” (AT&T’s television service), website browsing, mobile application usage, age and gender for reports to other customers interested, for example, in who is coming into their stores. AT&T says these reports would be aggregated and anonymized; your activity would only be reported as part of a group of people.
(Between this and Verizon’s offering, Euclid Analytics — a company that helps retailers track customers by their smartphone signals which has raised privacy hackles on the Hill — has some heavyweight competition.)
AT&T also plans to use the info to deliver more relevant ads to you. In a letter to customers, AT&T explains that if you hang out near movie theaters a lot, you may be labeled as a “movie fan” and receive ads about the latest blockbuster:
“People who live in a particular geographic area might appear to be very interested in movies, thanks to collective information that shows wireless devices from that area are often located in the vicinity of movie theaters. We might create a “movies” characteristic for that area, and deliver movie ads to the people who live there.”
The way this is aggregated means that you aren’t labeled a movie fan because you particularly hang out at a movie theater a lot, but that you are among a group of people that go to theaters a lot. You might not even be a movie fan but will be labeled as one if other AT&T customers in your demographic or neighborhood are. I’ll assume that if you live in a college dorm, you may wind up labeled as a “heavy drinker” or “single and looking” and then be hit up with beer ads or Match.com offers.*
In a blog post last week, AT&T’s chief privacy officer Bob Quinn pointed out that everybody else is doing it already:
In today’s online world, many companies are increasingly using customer data to help personalize and improve the products and services they offer consumers.All of us are familiar with Facebook FB +0.53% serving ads to its users based on common interests they have explicitly or implicitly documented on Facebook. And we know that Google GOOG +0.46% collects information and uses that to provide us with information and ads.In our own industry, Verizon uses anonymous and aggregate customer data to create marketing reports that help other companies better serve their customers.
They used to say that if you’re not paying for it, you are the product. Increasingly though, as companies try to monetize big data, you might be paying a hefty monthly bill to a company and still be the product.
“Instead of merely offering customers a trusted conduit for communication, carriers are coming to see subscribers as sources of data that can be mined for profit, a practice more common among providers of free online services like Google and Facebook,” wrote the Wall Street Journal in a May report on phone companies selling consumer info.
AT&T offers an opt-out. You can manage your privacy preferences athttp://www.att.com/cmpchoice (not to be confused with Chump Choice).
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