AT&T: We’re Officially Rolling With The NSA
(photo by Majka en Thrall)
David Lazarus, San Francisco Chronicle
AT&T rewrites rules: Your data isn’t yours
AT&T has issued an updated privacy policy that takes effect Friday. The changes are significant because they appear to give the telecom giant more latitude when it comes to sharing customers’ personal data with government officials.
The new policy says that AT&T — not customers — owns customers’ confidential info and can use it “to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process.”
The policy also indicates that AT&T will track the viewing habits of customers of its new video service — something that cable and satellite providers are prohibited from doing.
Moreover, AT&T (formerly known as SBC) is requiring customers to agree to its updated privacy policy as a condition for service — a new move that legal experts say will reduce customers’ recourse for any future data sharing with government authorities or others.
The company’s policy overhaul follows recent reports that AT&T was one of several leading telecom providers that allowed the National Security Agency warrantless access to its voice and data networks as part of the Bush administration’s war on terror.
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If you have a broadband cable connection and you’re still using AT&T, you deserve to be wire-tapped. Between Vonage and SkypeOut & Voicemail, there are enough stable VoIP choices out there to get off of the telcom infrastructure of eavesdropping.
Now, if I had no choice and had to use AT&T or Verizon as a provider, I’d be in contact (via email of course) with the Electronic Frontier Foundation today, adding my name to a class action lawsuit.
Tags: activism, Adam Smith Problem, ATT, business, capitalism, George Bush, illegal, New World Order, NSA, politics, Skype, telcos, Verizon, Vonage, wire taps.
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We receieved our final bill from AT&T this week after switching to Vonage. I wonder how many final bills AT&T and BellSouth will have to issue before they get a clue. I wonder if they’ll be sharing with their stockholders the number of customers who left this quarter. I’ll bet it’s significant.
I’d be very careful of using Cingular for cell service and BellSouth also. Since Cingular is the renamed AT&T Wireless, and BellSouth and SBC control Cingular, the management scenarios are very similar.
Personally, I hope Vonage stays afloat even with their stock plummeting. We really need the technology and they’re the only ones that seem to be fighting on the right side. Skype is great, but Skype can’t do 911 which is still a needed functionality.
yeah, i’m off the telco nipple for good. their uncontrolled monopoly and decisions to align with government instead of me — the paying customer — pisses me off to no end.
i’m on vonage, but their service is still buggy 10% of the time… i’ve been on business calls where my voice out dropped for 20 seconds at a time, so i have to issue a warning before each new call. hopefully that’ll be fixed soon enough.
as for skype, yeah, 911 is a market reach issue, but not for me personally (cell phone backup), so i’m leaning in their direction…
in a month, i’m going to seriously think about switching again (skype is sooo cheap and the sound quality is good and stable)
Hrm. You need to get QoS installed on your router. I don’t have any issues unless my Internet goes out or unless I’m getting a denial of service attack.
I have a broadband filter device that actually has worked extremely well for prioritizing the voice packets by Hawking Technologies. Might be worthwhile if you don’t feel like getting a new router or redesign your local network.
Skype also has some quality issues. My parents have complained that people use it to do the calling, and the sound quality blows. Another issue of QoS on routing, but most of your average users don’t know how to set that up.
I adopted VoIP back when Net2Phone was free and we were fooling around back in college with calling ourselves. But I have to say… I’m thoroughly disappointed with telcos. Course, like I’ve written before… common sense just doesn’t exist within senior management.
As far as Cingular and BellSouth/SBC are concerned, I’ve cared for the parent corps (the southern baby bells) and Cingular while having a decent GSM service, I’m afraid they could corrupt very easily. AT&T Wireless was managed differently from AT&T itself since it spun off, but with it being brought back into the fold, I’m sure there has been a lot of changes to do the bidding as everyone else.
What I’d be curious to find out is … if there are cellular services found to be implicated with similar taps (which I know can be done since the switch sides are pretty much the same type as telcos, except smaller) and that I’ve actually participated on debugging issues where we tapped our own test phones. It would definitely be interesting if someone dug up that cellular providers were in on this too (not that they are that I know of). Being said, the reason I say it is because with 911, most common cell phones have GPS enabled. While I don’t believe that there’s a governmental backdoor to enable the GPS without end-user 911 dialing, I don’t know for sure. Never did read all of the CALEA specs. If you could backdoor the GPS tracking, very not cool. I know we can already triangulate signals to a mere 50 feet or less.