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Paying AT&T to not track your surfing

I'm sure it costs AT&T so much money not to track you so the fees are obviously reasonable. Just think of the money they'd lose by not tracking your habits.
 
Nice Squirrel said:
I'm sure it costs AT&T so much money not to track you so the fees are obviously reasonable. Just think of the money they'd lose by not tracking your habits.
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No, the question is if $70 they charge above or below their actual cost to provide the service.
 
coloradoatheist said:
Nice Squirrel said:
I'm sure it costs AT&T so much money not to track you so the fees are obviously reasonable. Just think of the money they'd lose by not tracking your habits.
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No, the question is if $70 they charge above or below their actual cost to provide the service.
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Seeing that all is required is a switch for the consumer's account to not record their internet history, I have to think that the cost is near negligible.

Of course, the cost for implementing the "not recording everywhere you go" data is most certainly nothing compared to the lost revenue they would seek in selling the data.
 
So wait, their argument is that this isn't a 30 dollar penalty to discourage people from opting out of being tracked... it's a "discount" for the people who don't because advertisers pay the company to deliver personalized advertising. That is cartoon level evil company logic. What kind of incompetent PR department allows company spokespeople to say something like that?

Also, demanding a 100 dollars a month for 1gbs in an urban area is absurd to begin with; 100 dollars being what they're claiming it would cost if advertiser money wasn't subsidizing it. It certainly doesn't have to cost anywhere near that, even in the US. I know it's not a direct comparison (although my city is only 1.5 as densely populated as Austin so it shouldn't really be that far off); but if I wanted 1gbps internet, it'd cost me only 40 euros. Without the ISP delivering tracking information to advertisers. Come on America, stop letting your companies get away with this blatant crap.
 
Who would trust them not to track you regardless what you pay or what they claim they're doing?
 
Nice Squirrel said:
I'm sure it costs AT&T so much money not to track you so the fees are obviously reasonable. Just think of the money they'd lose by not tracking your habits.
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Well, they do have to pay for more space on that Clinton e-mail server.
 
So, when a large scale system does things, it logs requests. This isn't to sell data, its usually kept as a log for errors, intrusion attempts, congestion tracking. Making the data anonymous takes work, and oftentimes the fastest software and hardware available for large scale deployment doesn't even let you. It just ends up on a drive somewhere.

It doesn't matter what the system does. It could be AT&T's last mile routing system, or a data server, or whatever. Most systems keep logs of all requests and the requesting IP unless specifically configured not to, and doing that is risky; how do you balance network load when there is no log that outlines the shape of it.

And even when logging is optional, it's generally all or nothing. It's fast to just save everything and write it to disk. It's fast to throw everything away. But opening each request and making a decision is expensive, and using a hardware device to handle the strange task is also difficult.

So no shit it's going to be expensive for AT&T to not log your requests.
 
Jarhyn said:
So, when a large scale system does things, it logs requests. This isn't to sell data, its usually kept as a log for errors, intrusion attempts, congestion tracking. Making the data anonymous takes work, and oftentimes the fastest software and hardware available for large scale deployment doesn't even let you. It just ends up on a drive somewhere.

It doesn't matter what the system does. It could be AT&T's last mile routing system, or a data server, or whatever. Most systems keep logs of all requests and the requesting IP unless specifically configured not to, and doing that is risky; how do you balance network load when there is no log that outlines the shape of it.

And even when logging is optional, it's generally all or nothing. It's fast to just save everything and write it to disk. It's fast to throw everything away. But opening each request and making a decision is expensive, and using a hardware device to handle the strange task is also difficult.

So no shit it's going to be expensive for AT&T to not log your requests.
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Did you read the article? Because that isn't the argument that AT&T itself is making (and them not wanting to do the work to anonymize the data because it's hard isn't really an acceptable argument anyway); they're not claiming that it would cost them money to not track your data; they're claiming they can offer a "lower" (hah!) price to consumers who don't opt out of tracking because advertizers pay AT&T money for the tracking data/to deliver ad content. In other words, it has nothing to do with it supposedly costing them money to anonymize data; they just don't want to lose ad revenue and are spinning it into this bullshit about the regular price being a 'discount'.

Of course, if your scenario was actually the culprit, then all they'd have to do is to achieve the same effect as non-tracking is to keep whatever system they have in place for logging data requests and save everything to disk... but then just *not* sell or use any of it for advertising purposes. Just leave it on the disk for a period and only use it for whatever legitimate system analysis purposes is needed before deleting it. Problem solved: AT&T doesn't have to upgrade its systems to please customers like a normal company ought to, and customers don't have to pay a ridiculous fee to not be tracked for advertisers. Although of course they'd still do the exact same thing because hey, apparently people *are* stupid enough to convince giant corporations like AT&T that they can actually get away with something like this in the first place. Squeeze those morons for every cent they're willing to part with.

Pretty sure companies wouldn't dare suggesting something like this over here.
 
Well, they can say it's $100 and then $30 discount if you let them track you and sell this info to others.
Also I think google search, at least, is over https. So they should not be able to track that.
 
Jarhyn said:
So, when a large scale system does things, it logs requests. This isn't to sell data, its usually kept as a log for errors, intrusion attempts, congestion tracking. Making the data anonymous takes work, and oftentimes the fastest software and hardware available for large scale deployment doesn't even let you. It just ends up on a drive somewhere.

It doesn't matter what the system does. It could be AT&T's last mile routing system, or a data server, or whatever. Most systems keep logs of all requests and the requesting IP unless specifically configured not to, and doing that is risky; how do you balance network load when there is no log that outlines the shape of it.

And even when logging is optional, it's generally all or nothing. It's fast to just save everything and write it to disk. It's fast to throw everything away. But opening each request and making a decision is expensive, and using a hardware device to handle the strange task is also difficult.

So no shit it's going to be expensive for AT&T to not log your requests.
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My nominee for the strained rationalization of the month.
 
An AT&T spokeswoman characterized the GigaPower privacy option not as a charge to people who opted out of tracking but as a discount to those who didn’t. “We can offer a lower price to customers participating in AT&T Internet Preferences because advertisers will pay us for the opportunity to deliver relevant advertising and offers tailored to our customer’s interests,” she said.
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I read the article and they actually did what I said.

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NobleSavage said:
barbos said:
But VPN will cost you some, and there is no guarantee they don't track you.
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Not when my VPN goes through my server....
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If it's yours then you pay for it.
 
barbos said:
I read the article and they actually did what I said.

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NobleSavage said:
barbos said:
But VPN will cost you some, and there is no guarantee they don't track you.
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Not when my VPN goes through my server....
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If it's yours then you pay for it.
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It's a sunk cost. A free alternative would be to use Tor. It works well now, WRT latency, because so many people use it. If I had to pay for a VPN it would be a lot less than $30 a month. Would I trust a VPN service that is incorporated in Uzfuckastan and claims to keep no logs? Absolutely not, but I figure ATT's discounted spy service + foreign VPN, would be better than say Time Warner who has never really said, "We do not spy on you." I just assume everyone is spying and if I want some measure of privacy, I have to take care of it myself.
 
NobleSavage said:
barbos said:
I read the article and they actually did what I said.

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NobleSavage said:
barbos said:
But VPN will cost you some, and there is no guarantee they don't track you.
Click to expand...

Not when my VPN goes through my server....
Click to expand...

If it's yours then you pay for it.
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It's a sunk cost. A free alternative would be to use Tor. It works well now, WRT latency, because so many people use it. If I had to pay for a VPN it would be a lot less than $30 a month. Would I trust a VPN service that is incorporated in Uzfuckastan and claims to keep no logs? Absolutely not, but I figure ATT's discounted spy service + foreign VPN, would be better than say Time Warner who has never really said, "We do not spy on you." I just assume everyone is spying and if I want some measure of privacy, I have to take care of it myself.
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I think even with your own VPN server, NSA still knows your porn preferences rather well.
 
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