After AT&T was caught feeding data to the NSA through a specially configured backdoor, they swore that they were not willing participants and promised to take better care in securing their customers’ privacy. Their new plan to help people keep spies away makes it look like the company is making good on its promises. But it is no selfless deed on the part of AT&T. Subscribers can expect to pay an additional 29 US dollars every month if they want to keep their activities private.
Extorting for Privacy
AT&T is going to start charging subscribers a hefty monthly privacy fee to keep communications information private. And it’s not the NSA that they are going to stop from taking subscriber data. AT&T itself wants that data, and subscribers will pay for the company’s promise not to touch it. This sounds more like extortion than fulfilling a long awaited guarantee to do all they can to protect their customers.
The new Internet fees of AT&T are hefty enough already since they started selling packages for the new Kansas City, Missouri GigaPower service. Subscribers can get up to 1 gigabit per second on these new lines for 70 dollars a month. Any customer on such a high speed connection is expected to be transmitting a lot of data. This is very tempting for anyone who knows how to make money from data mining. And AT&T can make loads of it with all their connections and effortless access to a ton of all kinds of Internet communications and customer data.
Of course, no one is saying that AT&T really planned on a massive data mining operation when they launched GigaPower. After all, they can make an extra 29 dollars each month from every single customer they have, a across America, without having to do anything at all. And if some subscribers won’t pay up, they can always go and sell that data anyway. And they can also make another deal with the NSA on the side for extra boy scout points. But market analysts are almost certain that most GigaPower subscribers are going to pay because, let’s face it, no one wants to be spied on by their service provider, who knows everything about what they do online.
VPN Privacy
There is still hope for AT&T subscribers who don’t have much of a choice when it comes to Internet service providers, or who have been caught up by flashy promises and find themselves in a lock in agreement that they can’t break without taking losses. Their privacy does not have to cost them so much, and they can get it from a professional privacy service that actually cares that they be able to preserve this very basic right. We know of several privacy oriented VPNs that give the guarantee of online anonymity to Internet users right now. And anyone can have it from a more trustworthy company for much less than AT&T is trying to bleed from them.
AT&T is at this very moment mining the data of their customers. They admit it openly, and even tell us that they are taking detailed notes on customer website visits. They are collecting records of what subscribers search for, where they go, where they navigate to from there, and how long they stay at each site and page. This of course goes along with their IP addresses, and is linked to the personal information that they provide to the company when they sign on for Internet services. A VPN can stop them from being able to track these activities, making it impossible for the company to take any of this valuable data.
But why is this data s valuable in the first place? Advertising companies pay well to get information on how people use the Internet. They analyze this data and create behavioral profiles, which they are paid to do. Companies that sell products and services are always looking for ways to sell more, and they hire advertisers to help them. The profiles tell the companies what people are looking for, how they go about their searches, and where they expect to find these things that they are looking for. So Internet users are giving up their personal information so that retailers can hound them with ads that AT&T is more than happy to get paid to serve up.
VPNs also provide Internet users with top level security. This is a huge added benefit that helps them to keep their data from being read in the rare event that it leaks out of the private VPN tunnel, or if AT&T someday figures out how to get around it. VPN services offer high level encryption that turns data into gibberish for anyone who is not authorized to read it. Part of this security is also protection against malicious ads that always find their way to people. VPNs are not anti-malware tools, but they can prevent the ads from showing up in the first place by blocking AT&T from collecting the data that is used to create customer profiles.
