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AT&T Advertising

'The Future of AT&T Is An Ad-tracking Nightmare Hellworld' (theverge.com) 133

There's something scary in Fortune's new article about AT&T: "Say you and your neighbor are both DirecTV customers and you're watching the same live program at the same time," says Brian Lesser, who oversees the vast data-crunching operation that supports this kind of advertising at AT&T. "We can now dynamically change the advertising. Maybe your neighbor's in the market for a vacation, so they get a vacation ad. You're in the market for a car, you get a car ad. If you're watching on your phone, and you're not at home, we can customize that and maybe you get an ad specific to a car retailer in that location."

Such targeting has caused privacy headaches for Yahoo, Google, and Facebook, of course. That's why AT&T requires that customers give permission for use of their data; like those other companies, it anonymizes that data and groups it into audiences -- for example, consumers likely to be shopping for a pickup truck -- rather than targeting specific individuals. Regardless of how you see a directed car ad, say, AT&T can then use geolocation data from your phone to see if you went to a dealership and possibly use data from the automaker to see if you signed up for a test-drive -- and then tell the automaker, "Here's the specific ROI on that advertising," says Lesser. AT&T claims marketers are paying four times the usual rate for that kind of advertising.

"This is a terrifying vision of permanent surveillance," argues the Verge (in an article shared by schwit1): In order to make this work, AT&T would have to:

- Own the video services you're watching so it can dynamically place targeted ads in your streams

- Collect and maintain a dataset of your personal information and interests so it can determine when it should target this car ad to you

- Know when you're watching something so it can actually target the ads

- Track your location using your phone and combine it with the ad-targeting data to see if you visit a dealership after you see the ads

- Collect even more data about you from the dealership to determine if you took a test-drive

- Do all of this tracking and data collection repeatedly and simultaneously for every ad you see

- Aggregate all of that data in some way for salespeople to show clients and justify a 4x premium over other kinds of advertising, including the already scary-targeted ads from Google and Facebook.

If this was a story about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, this scheme would cause a week-long outrage cycle...

AT&T can claim up and down that it's asked for permission to use customer information to do this, but there is simply no possible way the average customer has ever even read their AT&T contracts, let alone puzzled out that they're signing up to be permanently tracked and influenced by targeted media in this way.

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'The Future of AT&T Is An Ad-tracking Nightmare Hellworld'

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  • by Voice of satan ( 1553177 ) on Sunday May 26, 2019 @03:52PM (#58658592)

    ... and this is why i often go out without my phone.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Even if you don't bring your phone, or even if you take other precautions, stuff like your web browser may collect and transmit data about you.

      Take Firefox's privacy policy, for example. [mozilla.org]

      I suggest reading it if you haven't already. It's surprising how much user data Firefox collects and transmits.

      It doesn't matter if the collection can be disabled, or if it's disclosed. Neither should magically make what Firefox is doing "acceptable" to a security conscious user.

      I think that lots of people use Firefox thinki

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      Or just yank its battery out and put back it in when needed?

      • My emergency-only cellphone has the ability to shut down altogether without any need to physically touch the battery, which results in extremely little power loss over weeks or months of sitting unused. I think virtually all lithium-ion cellphone batteries suffer from this sort of gradual power drain even if not connected to anything. Admittedly, restarting the cellphone takes about 80 seconds, but that's okay for a backup cellphone that I might use but once or twice a year..

    • by Anonymous Coward

      How about carrying it but leaving it in airplane mode which shuts down all of the radios (except maybe GPS, but I keep that disabled most of the time).

      It really sucks when you unexpectantly find yourself in a desperate or grave situation and you need to use a phone at that moment, and then you realise it's sitting at home now useless to you.

  • Interesting.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Freischutz ( 4776131 ) on Sunday May 26, 2019 @03:56PM (#58658610)

    "This is a terrifying vision of permanent surveillance," argues the Verge (in an article shared by schwit1): In order to make this work, AT&T would have to:

    - Own the video services you're watching so it can dynamically place targeted ads in your streams

    - Collect and maintain a dataset of your personal information and interests so it can determine when it should target this car ad to you

    - Know when you're watching something so it can actually target the ads

    - Track your location using your phone and combine it with the ad-targeting data to see if you visit a dealership after you see the ads

    - Collect even more data about you from the dealership to determine if you took a test-drive

    - Do all of this tracking and data collection repeatedly and simultaneously for every ad you see

    - Aggregate all of that data in some way for salespeople to show clients and justify a 4x premium over other kinds of advertising, including the already scary-targeted ads from Google and Facebook.

    ....and people are getting hysterical about the 'posibility that Huawei might be helping the Chinese government spy on you.

    • The sad truth is that most people are generally okay with some behavior they'd otherwise consider awful depending on who's doing it. You don't have to look much further than politics, sports, or religion for a lot of folks before you can find plenty of examples of this.
    • Huawei invading your privacy is a problem because you didn't agree to it. AT&T doing this stuff is considered OK because you agreed to it.

      What makes your "agreement" with AT&T (or Comcast or Verizon, etc) tenuous is because of the stupid government-mandated cable monopolies we suffer with. Even if you don't want to agree with AT&T doing this stuff, you often have no choice but to submit to their terms if you want to have Internet or TV service at all.
      • Huawei invading your privacy is a problem because you didn't agree to it. AT&T doing this stuff is considered OK because you agreed to it.

        I rather seriously doubt that most people really understand the full extent of what AT&T is doing when they sign one of their agreements. Furthermore, as I have pointed out before and will never tire of pointing out again, AT&T, Verizon, Facebook, Google, Twitter spy on you on a level that yields them orders of magnitude more information about your private life than the Chinese government can ever hope to acquire or is probably even interested in acquiring. The Chinese are after militarily, politica

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Companies based in the US are theoretically bound by US law, so there's at least some vague chance of restraining them through a democratic process. Large Chinese companies are proxy actors for a totalitarian regime, they do whatever they want.

      Also, you might consider the moral implications of doing business with a country that is setting up actual, real-life concentration camps for an ethnic minority, when you're done playing Candy Crush on your Huawei smartphone.

      • US lawmakers aren't owned by Chinese lobbyists, they're owned by American lobbyists. I'm less afraid of surveillance from Huawei than I am from AT&T, because Huawei actually runs the risk of being penalized for bad behavior. AT&T does not.
    • by Jack9 ( 11421 )

      Digital Advertising is both more advanced than people imagine and more primitive. I have done most of this.

      - Own the video services you're watching so it can dynamically place targeted ads in your streams (done)
      - Collect and maintain a dataset of your personal information and interests so it can determine when it should target this car ad to you (done)
      - Know when you're watching something so it can actually target the ads (done)
      - Track your location using your phone and combine it with the ad-targeting data

    • ....and people are getting hysterical about the 'posibility that Huawei might be helping the Chinese government spy on you.

      There is quite a difference between a company wanting to see how ads perform, vs.a government looking for people with exploitable weaknesses to use for blackmail and espionage.

  • by TechyImmigrant ( 175943 ) on Sunday May 26, 2019 @04:13PM (#58658680) Homepage Journal

    This is timely.

    I cancelled my account with AT&T yesterday.
    To switch to Google Fi.
    Because Google don't track me right?

  • I don't understand how they sell TV advertising these days. I haven't watched an ad since I bought my VCR+ in 1994. All the TV services come with a DVR these days. I would think the only people still seeing ads are people watching live sports in a bar, and people who can't afford TV services and therefore wouldn't be advertising targets.
    • Also older people.

      Growing up in the 1970s-1980s, my family had the TV on all the time. This seemed to be true in most households I visited as a kid. And I notice it’s still how both my mom and my in-laws behave... go to their house and the TV is on from morning until evening, even if no one is sitting in front of it.

  • by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Sunday May 26, 2019 @04:17PM (#58658692)

    Even if a customer does read all the fine print and realizes they are going to be tracked and have their privacy violated in this way, they may have no choice but to sign up with AT&T. For home internet, AT&T may be the only option (or the other options may be just as bad on privacy). Same with cellular service, home phone, pay TV and other products AT&T sells.

    • by irving47 ( 73147 )

      They come up with the most awful, screw-the-consumer schemes, sometimes it's hard to believe the stock price has been so stagnant. (The dividends are pretty much the highest out there, though.)

  • They don't have any technology to track and stop someone sending billions of robo calls.

  • by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Sunday May 26, 2019 @04:25PM (#58658724) Journal

    It seems to me that we're 95% of the way there right now.

    There's so much surveillance in place right now that I don't know why this hasn't already happened.

    The capability of "smart" TVs will only get worse and worse in terms of tracking and reporting your viewing habits. Alexa and similar devices will bridge the gap until you won't be able to go to the bathroom without being heckled by an ad for a new brand of toilet paper. Your cellphone tracks you every moment unless it's turned off. Your streaming music and video services track everything you consume, as does nearly every website on the planet. Your car will soon be tattling on you, and license plate readers and credit card trails and smart watches mean that pretty much everything you do is logged somewhere.

    Your privacy is, for all intents and purposes, nonexistent right now. It's getting harder and harder to do anything in any meaningful way that isn't being captured by someone somewhere.

    The only hope that all of us become "jammers", as described in one of the episodes of The Prisoner (It's Your Funeral [wikipedia.org]). But, even if we started swamping the databases with loads of bogus data today, it's still probably too late.

    It's enough to make one want to go live in a hut on an island.

  • If I, as a consumer, wanted ads from a competitor, or was willing to pass my shopping behavior to multiple vendors by choice, it might give me more information to make a better deal.

    Maybe I can leverage multiple vendors of the same or similar product who all know that I'm looking for a beer, and one nearby might say "Hey! Our happy hour has your favorite beer at a good price".

    The "nightmare" is the involuntary tracking part - not the competitive behavior of consumers who want the information.

    Who controls ou

  • Holy shit, targeted advertising??? What a nightmare hellworld!

  • This is why they keep trying to force me to "upgrade" my TiVO to a Genie.

  • by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Sunday May 26, 2019 @06:57PM (#58659300)

    >"'The Future of AT&T"
    >"We can now dynamically change the advertising"

    What's an "ad"? Is that like a commercial? I remember those from 25 years ago, you know, before DVD, Bluray, TiVo, other DVRs, NetFlix, streaming. In whose "The Future" are ads? Do people really still tolerate those?

  • by Dunbal ( 464142 ) * on Sunday May 26, 2019 @07:03PM (#58659328)
    More stupid algos that will advertise cars to you when you just bought a car, vacations when you just came back from vacation and condoms because you stayed in a motel.
  • being tracked is the least of my worries. I'm much more concerned with the fact that my ruling elite are busy automating the jobs away in a society where if you don't work, you don't eat. And in the short term I'm an American so I don't even have reliable access to medical care or a pension for when I'm too old to work.
  • ...imagine these techniques & strategies applied to political ad campaigning & social manipulation by corporations & billionaires. What kind of misinformed & misled electorate & faux democracy would we end up with? Oh, wait. They're already doing that with traditional news media.
  • Requiring mobile data providers to allow me to connect to my VPN. They're preventing me from opting for more privacy.
  • Maybe your neighbor's in the market for a vacation, so they get a vacation ad. You're in the market for a car, you get a car ad.

    So it's like the current Internet: shop for bright green underwear, and you see ads for bright green underwear for 6 months.

  • Am I the only one who read that as "helloworld" !?

  • I'd rather have no internet and wired phone service than put up with that bullshit. AT&T can blow it out their ass.
  • Don't be fooled - this kind of dystopian surveillance is not about advertising. Online ads don't work. No one with a clue sees ads; no one at all clicks on them.

    Surveillance is about surveillance. It's about selling our personal data to the gestapo. That's where all that "ad revenue" really comes from.

    The only solution is political. Invasive surveillance must be made very illegal. Illegal at the federal, state, and local levels. And this must be achieved soon, while we still have at least the formal structu

  • Fuck this world
  • I clicked on an ad with a pretty supermodel, though I don't buy women's clothing. Instantly 3/4 of other web sites were showing ads from this company.

    I really don't want that on TV ads, too. It's bad enough I see it, now others see my ads too?

  • I fail to see what part of the process being described is "terrifying" or indicative of a "nightmare world". How would my ISP collecting data on me and using it to increase their ad revenue negatively impact my life? If it makes the ads I see more relevant to my interests and less annoying/offputting, the process would be a net gain.
  • If you've ever indulged a random interest in shipping containers, and googled it for fun, you know the advertising hell that unleashes. You will likely fins ads for shipping containers dominate your online activities - everywhere. Every time. Sometimes annoying.

    So use thus to your advantage. Random searches that poison your profile give you meaningless, pointless, useless ads. You can tune tham out, even more completely than you do now, and use the time secure in the knowledge that you're not missing anythi

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