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AT&T
AT&T hasn't disclosed much about its intentions for user data. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
AT&T hasn't disclosed much about its intentions for user data. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

AT&T wants to know: how much would you pay for a little online privacy?

This article is more than 10 years old
AT&T's 'Austin offer' gives customers two options: higher price, more privacy. Or lower price, but your online movements tracked

What's one piece of your privacy worth? About a dollar a day, suggests telecom giant AT&T.

The company's latest internet service offering in Austin, Texas comes in two flavors. The company might as well call them the "some privacy" and "no privacy" services. The cheaper version gives customers a discount in return for being targeted more intrusively than ever by user-specific advertising.

Let me explain: the company's Austin experiment is a test to see what a specific market will bear in highly specific conditions. AT&T is offering some Austin neighborhoods its "U-verse with GigaPower" product, which comes in $99 per month "standard" and $70 per month "premier" editions, the latter requiring an agreement to let AT&T "use your individual web browsing information, like the search terms you enter and the web pages you visit, to tailor ads and offers to your interests".

The trial highlights several realities about internet service in America. First, of course, is the relatively low speed and high cost of most service, due to the so-called "marketplace" of just one or two providers in most cities. AT&T's Austin offering is 10 times the speed of the comparable Comcast service where I live, at about the same price. Why? Competition, which barely exists elsewhere in the US. This is plainly a response to Google's upcoming fiber-to-home product in Austin, as opposed to any serious move by the telecom company to innovate on price or service.

The AT&T website is quite vague about what the company actually plans to do in its surveillance of customers' web use, and how it will conduct that surveillance in the first place. Their promise:

[AT&T] will not collect information from secure (https) or otherwise encrypted sites, such as when you enter your credit card to buy something online or do online banking on a secure site.

Interesting wording, because it suggests AT&T could choose to do otherwise, but unless it's hacking basic security systems, that shouldn't be possible in any case.

Encryption is the easy dodge for customers who want to get the lower price and thwart AT&T's extra surveillance, of course. A customer could simply use a virtual private network (VPN), which creates an encrypted tunnel for all data. Will AT&T permit this? There's no hint in the terms of service.

Nonetheless, what AT&T is doing has one real virtue: telling customers explicitly that they will trade money for privacy. In an internet economy today where we are given few if any choices of this sort, that's progress of a kind.

Google and other major internet companies have made it clear that our use of their services is free only in one narrow sense. As the saying goes, we, the users, are the product being sold to others – mainly advertisers – and we have absolutely no control over the data being collected, massaged, bartered, and sometimes abused.

AT&T's isn't the first to foray in this area. Internet service providers have been looking for years to find ways to leverage their unique hold over customers – their ability to probe what we do and make money off it, despite the blatant invasion of privacy that represents. US and British telecom companies have experimented with the "phorm" product that snooped on browsing habits, one of several such attempts over the years.

This kind of thing should clearly not be permitted, period. ISPs should provide one service only: the connection and the data. Yet the AT&T Austin offering does suggest ways we could encourage other kinds of providers to behave better. If Google et al offered paid services that guaranteed no snooping on my data, I'd be much happier about using them.

One area where this is especially necessary is in mobile. App developers have taken extreme liberties with our personal privacy by demanding a variety of "permissions", as they're called in the Android ecosystem, before we're allowed to download and use their products. Permissions can include access to our phone-calling and contacts, location data, and much more. Sometimes app developers lie about what they're doing. The US Federal Trade Commission recently made a settlement with one that had been collecting location information despite promises to the contrary.

A recent study by two University of Colorado economists suggests that mobile phone owners would pay for some privacy. On a per-app basis, wrote Scott Savage and Donald M Waldman, users were "willing to make a one-time payment for each app of $2.28 to conceal their browser history, $4.05 to conceal their list of contacts, $1.19 to conceal their location, $1.75 to conceal their phone's identification number, and $3.58 to conceal the contents of their text messages. The consumer is also willing to pay $2.12 to eliminate advertising". And the more experienced a user was with the technology, the more he or she was willing to pay – strongly suggesting that educated technology users don't like what's being done to them.

For a few months this year, it appeared that Google was going to be one of the truly good guys in one respect, offering built-in privacy tools for mobile devices running the latest Android operating system. Sadly, the company removed them in an update, with an absurd explanation that raises even more suspicions about its commitment to privacy. There are other ways to block invasive apps, but those typically involve mucking with the device in ways that average users should be wary of trying.

But again, the question of privacy when it comes to the telecom ISPs like AT&T is a different matter entirely, and more worrisome. Not only are they in a position of enormous power over their customers, they are notoriously contemptuous of our privacy; see AT&T's "it's none of your business" response to shareholders seeking accountability for the company's willy nilly handover of data to security services. Moreover, they increasingly insist on a right to decide what bits of data get to us, in what order, and at what speed, and they increasingly determined to monetize our use of the services beyond the already hugely profitable provision of connections.

We need laws, with teeth, that stop these companies from treating us all like mice in experimental labs. We also need end-to-end encryption of everything we do online. (VPNs are useful for now, but not the ultimate solution.) Until that happens, we need to recognize that the internet industry is much more interested in its bottom line than our privacy. For now, if I have to buy some privacy – and decide I can trust the promises companies make – I'll do so, gladly.

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