AT&T To End Targeted Ads Program, Give All Users Lowest Available Price 44
AT&T has confirmed to ArsTechnica that it is getting rid of Internet Preferences, a controversial program that analyzed home internet customers' web browsing habits in order to serve some targeted ads. From the report:"To simplify our offering for our customers, we plan to end the optional Internet Preferences advertising program related to our fastest Internet speed tiers," an AT&T spokesperson said. "As a result, all customers on these tiers will receive the best rate we have available for their speed tier in their area. We'll begin communicating this update to customers early next week." Data collection and targeted ads will be shut off, AT&T also confirmed. Since AT&T introduced Internet Preferences for its GigaPower fiber Internet service in 2013, customers had to opt into the traffic scanning program in order to receive the lowest available rate. Customers who wanted more privacy had to pay another $29 a month for standalone Internet access; bundles including TV or phone service could cost more than $60 extra when customers didn't opt in.
In their area.... (Score:4, Interesting)
will receive the best rate we have available for their speed tier in their area.
How about we just make it illegal to price a product differently just because they have no competition in certain areas, while others have lots.
One price per tier, across the country, regardless of competition...
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At&t business 12Mbps ADSL2+ is $45/mo here in sallisaw oklahoma ($50/mo without bundling phone) what's it cost where you live?...
What! it signs me in using my ip now?!! on a business account?!
neat, plausible, and wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
> One price per tier, across the country, regardless of competition...
Beware of unintended consequences. They could easily respond to that by pulling out of any market where there is competition, because those are much fewer than the markets where they have monopoly power. Better to give up a minority of their least profitable customers than stop ripping off the majority of their customers. An exit like that would also leave the remaining ISP free to raise their rates since they no longer have any comp
NYC more expensive than Dallas (Score:2)
Some areas of the country are more expensive because of labor costs, land costs, or other reasons. Now, that said, you can make it illegal to price differently because of competition. But the best way to do that is to have local commissions set rates or similar.
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Are they getting rid of the packet inspection? (Score:3)
Or are they just silently applying it to everyone, and getting rid of the target ads and the opt-out so no one actually knows they're being tracked?
Re:Are they getting rid of the packet inspection? (Score:5, Interesting)
Packet inspection is non-monetizable without a product.
Typically, data collection warehouses categorize and aggregate demographics information. That is to say: businesses don't sell your name and address; they sell the service of identifying preferences among demographics, demographics in an area, and likely market penetration when targeting a demographic in an area. Without all the arbitrary big words: they tell you how the population responds to certain products, services, and ideals, where that population is, and how big it is, and then you can target an area (a city) or a demographic (buy targeted ads aimed at a large, highly-responsive audience).
Sifting through all that data is hard. It's a highly-specialized task, and businesses which do this as a service tend to build robust organizational knowledge: their employees get good at their jobs, share information among each other, and send it up to management to be packaged and distributed as standard operating procedure and training material. Asking them what the market looks like is a hell of a lot cheaper and provides much better results than getting their giant database of information and trying to analyze it yourself: your own people will suck payroll while spending excessive amounts of time digging around in it, scratching their heads, making up arbitrary queries that seem obvious, and then produce *a* result--instead of identifying the goals and then immediately and systematically producing an analysis strategy that produces a *high-quality* result.
AT&T probably has little vested interest in tracking your web behavior, and likely found ads weren't making them sufficient money for the infrastructure cost. They would have spent a lot of time looking at this, predicting the cost of scaling (which would improve ROI), and working out if the new ROI was likely to be significantly-higher and considerably profitable. They might have identified a small profit (e.g. 0.5% margin, or 0.01% of their existing profit, or the like) and decided that the risks (the likelihood of earning less and facing a loss as an aggregate over the long run) weren't worth it. They might have just identified that ads aren't going to make them money at all. In any case, they have little use for large-scale inspection now because it only puts them at risk (notably regulatory risk--you inspected this shit, how did you not know child porn was there?) with no likely profit.
Even the ad networks that could use AT&T's theoretical tracking data can't make much use of it. They'd have to coalesce it with their data--which has to be robust, because they have to be able to actually track and identify users across the Web anyway--which is expensive and poor ROI if their data is already robust enough to match up to AT&T's data. There's a high likelihood that the attempt would actually pollute the ad network's mined data with erroneous data, since coalescing might not be anywhere near 100% accurate, and measuring the false-positive rate is impossible (if you could do it automatically, you wouldn't have false-positives; if you can do it manually, you're working with dozens of people's data rather than millions).
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Intrigued by your signature petition. Even in the U.K. where we have a universal 'social security' we have great difficulties in getting it to benefit the real areas of poverty as homelessness (no "ZIP Code" or our 'Post Code') makes form filling to get acceptance by government officials impossible.
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That Universal Social Security is based on the United States's $1.7 trillion (2013) spending on welfare, including Social Security old-age pensions, Social Security disability insurance, unemployment insurance, food security (SNAP, WIC), and housing assistance (HUD). There are some transitional considerations (grandfathering of Old-age pensions; continuation or reduction of state programs; etc.) to avoid disrupting the financial situation of households receiving current benefits; none of this causes a bum
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The other problem AT&T had... (Score:5, Interesting)
...Customers who wanted more privacy had to pay another $29 a month..
Once AT&T put a price on customer privacy ($29 per month) then, if AT&T were ever found violating customer privacy, the cost to settle would start at $29 per month per customer involved. imo, AT&T's legal department did not want to have a specific cost placed on customer privacy.
$29/mo for Privacy? (Score:2)
"Customers who wanted more privacy had to pay another $29 a month for standalone Internet access"
That's insane. Internet shouldn't cost that much alone. At an extra $29/mo, they're forcing your hand to accept the invasion of privacy as a way of life.
Somehow I suspect... (Score:5, Interesting)
...that they scanned all users data no matter what. It's just that some people were willing to pay a large sum of money to pretend it wasn't happening.
I also suspect SSL is making it harder for them to learn anything.
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I also suspect SSL is making it harder for them to learn anything.
This. Google defaults to encrypted, they can't see what you're searching for on the worlds most popular search engine.
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They will not allow you to use your own DNS settings on your router, so they are collecting that data.
One reason why I switched to cable.
I miss the latency though..... DSL was 5ms and cable is around 20 ms in my area. Great for FPS games.
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HTTPS Everywhere
https://www.eff.org/https-ever... [eff.org]
That's unusual (Score:4, Insightful)
About the recently defunct AT&T ad program: there are innumerable little such bullshit annoyances which businesses create for customers because it's part of the of the superstition and business culture to assume without question that whatever fraction of a percent of increased revenue they generate merits the frustration which they cause customers.
It's like those sale signs in the grocery store, "Sale, two for [some price]." You stand there, wasting time reading the sign, trying to figure out if you actually have to buy two to get the discount or if you just buy one do you still get a discounted price. Make this easier for everyone and state the sale price of just one, assholes. Of course the people making those labels believe they will cause customers to buy more if they suggest to do that, despite whatever inconvenience that creates when discovering the sales policy for smaller quantities. When I see those signs now, I think to myself, "well, fuck you too," and then shop at Costco and order from Amazon to avoid the bullshit. It is important to attune your senses to such corporate marketing and sales crap and then subvert or work around it; The expansion of corporate bullshit annoyance depends on customers not consciously recognizing and accounting for its burden.
The encrustation of that kind of crap has grown to such levels because customers are not consciously aware of the burden. But because its absence is psychologically uplifting, they respond positively with dollars when it is purged. Remember all those other web search engines which Google totally crushed? Their home pages loaded up with advertising? Then Google defied the convention of crowding ever-more advertising into the search page and displayed only their logo and the search box, and minimal, discrete related advertising in search results. And it was good. And the design genius of the Steve Jobs and the award-winning, insanely-high-sales-revenue-per-square-foot Apple Stores? Actually very simple formula: It's just stuff you want to buy sitting out on tables to look at and then purchase. The glass and wood and stone is cool, but it is slight-of-hand. The real reason the stores work is because of the absence of store bullshit. Stuff you want to buy sitting on tables to look at. Absolute genius.
Hopefully the beginning of the end. (Score:4, Interesting)
Targeted ads are just another opportunity to rip off people by showing them different prices for the same thing. Sort of like how Coke wanted to have vending machines that would raise the price when it was hot outside.
The problem with targeted ads, of course, is that it only takes a quick search to find a better deal if what they're offering you isn't competitive. Anyone remember how for a while big-box electronic stores that offered to price match, when you went to show them the ad on their computer system, the price was higher than what you had seen at home a few hours before, because the stores would serve dummy clones of their competitors with higher prices? Had to stop once browsing over the cell network became practical, as long as you didn't use their wi-fi.
I can just imagine the call... (Score:4, Funny)
"Dear $Customer:
We have been ripping you off for years, and have finally decided to make things right (sort of). As of $Date we will be adjusting your price to the lowest price in your area ($area). Sure, our services are still available cheaper in other areas, but what are you going to do about it? Move houses?
Sincerely,
AT&T, where customers come first*
*If they live in the right area"
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>> As of $Date we will be adjusting your price to the lowest price in your area ($area).
You forgot something: "..which for you will mean an increase of an extra $localizedSupplyAndDemandFactor per month"
LOL (Score:1)
AT&T has high-speed? (Score:2)
Really? My fastest AT&T DSL in the good days when I was a 1/4 mile to a DSLAM was a whopping 6Mbps.
Then I moved - six years ago - to bumfuck western edge of southeast Florida, and the best AT&T could do was 1.5.. on a good day.
I tossed AT&T out for everything except mobile and put internet on my existing tv comcast ripoff. At least it's fast..
I had no idea AT&T had such a low-handed program.
Thieves.. all of them.. I'm atheist but there's a saying back home.. "They'll steal the nails from t