Last year, you might recall AT&T silently started charging between $531 and $800 more per year if customers desired to opt out of AT&T’s Internet Preferences program, which uses intense packet inspection to track and monetize user action around the Internet. AT&T was profoundly criticized for the move, and eventually stopped charging the additional fees but only to help secure regulatory permission for its Time Warner merger.
But with AT&T getting every evidence that its latest massive merger will be accepted by Trump despite a campaign vow to kill the deal, and AT&T has just successfully pressured to kill consumer broadband privacy rules, the organization says the “privacy surcharge” may be returning.
In a conference on C-SPAN, AT&T Senior Vice President Bob Quinn was keen to acknowledge that the idea wasn’t popular amongst consumer advocates and customers.
“We got a huge amount of criticism from privacy advocates while we rolled out, in Austin, Texas, an ad-supported Internet service…Privacy advocates yelled about that,” said Quinn.
Of course, that was before and this is now. After strongly lobbying the GOP to kill consumer privacy protections, AT&T lobbyists have turned their attention toward killing net neutrality and ferreting all overlooking of broadband ISPs to an over-extended and ill-equipped FTC. As such, there’s very few on the horizon stopping AT&T from doing whatever it damn well wishes under the Trump administration.
“As the privacy reconstruction evolves, I think people are going to require more control, and maybe that’s the pricing model that’s eventually what consumers want,” said Quinn, who repeatedly tried to emphasize this was simply “ad-supported Internet service” that the company would be returned eventually.
But “more control” is the reverse of what AT&T offered. The company’s U-Verse broadband customers had to navigate a complex array of options to even find the opt-out function, and even then AT&T didn’t do a really good job making it clear that defending your own privacy would be hugely expensive. Also, note that while spending this additional money stopped you from seeing targeted ads, it didn’t yet truly stop AT&T from collecting this data.
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