Verizon Starts to Lose Customers Due to Tracking

Capitalizing on all the information we put into our cell phones,Verizon Wireless is selling all our app usage and location information to marketers, reports CNET's Declan McCullagh.

Part of what it calls the Precision Market Insights initiative, Verizon is not only tracking consumers, it is sharing that information with other companies, and possibly linking it to databases with more of your personal information. "We're able to view just everything that they do,"

Bill Diggins, U.S. chief for the Verizon Wireless marketing initiative, said at an industry conference earlier this year. "And that's really where data is going today. Data is the new oil."

If it sounds creepy, that's because it might not be legal, even though Verizon did the bare minimum to make it sound that way by only selling the information in aggregate and also providing an opt-out feature. 

This might violate federal wiretapping law because it digs deep into our cell phone transactions.

Verizon has said that it doesn't give these marketers the information of individual customers, but does so in aggregate. For example, if a company wants to know about the behavior of say 35 year old arab males, they can get the cell phone behaviors of that audience, but not of a specific man in that group. 

What Verizon Is Doing to skirt the law by allowing users to opt-out of the tracking on the Verizon Wireless websites. Users have to first sign in and head to the My Privacy section of the website. There, the subscriber will apparently find three different boxes to uncheck, as pictured below.

Though, when we went to the site, it did not show up as such, giving us just one "do not track" button to click.

Yes, Verizon offers an opt-out option. But the harder it is to opt-out, the more likely it is to violate FTC privacy guidelines. This confusion certainly won't help the wireless carrier's case. 

Verizon claims that the anonymity plus the ability to opt-out avoids incurring any harm on an individual.

Wiretapping is essentially becoming routine in order to give these marketers this information it is possible Verizon is doing what is called "deep packet inspection." Meaning it giving up more information than we might like.