Today’s offender in the world of mobile service providers is T-Mobile. The dropped “Uncarrier” a new pink colored mobile plan – iIt’s a little more upsetting if it. By at least, if you care about T-Mobile’s data collection practices, and who shares this data met. (You have to worry a lot about it.)
As Drew FitzGerald of The Wall Street Journal write:
‘The American service provider no. 2 by subscribers said in a recent update on the privacy policy that unless they withdraw it, customers’ web and mobile app data will be shared with advertisers from 26 April. For example, the program can help advertisers identify people who love cooking or are sports enthusiasts, the company said.
T-Mobile’s new policy will also apply to Sprint customers acquired through the carrier’s merger in 2020. Sprint previously only shared similar data from customers who opted in to their third-party advertising program. ”
While T-Mobile tries to identify the data it packs and anonymously to advertisers by coding distinctive features, that does not mean that what you do and what applications you use are completely anonymous. Aaron Mackey, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, quoted later in the FitzGerald piece, says it is a “Trivial” case to disclose a user’s identity (and telephone practices) by comparing information to multiple data sets.
Back in 2019, researchers at two European universities found the same thing. Their results, published in a paper entitled “The assessment of the success of re-identification in incomplete data sets using generative models”, found that “de-identification”, or the alleged anonymity of a data set, is not very useful if the measured factors can single out individuals – either alone or when combined with other data sets.
Using our model, we find that 99.98% of Americans in any dataset would be correctly recognized using 15 demographic characteristics. Our results suggest that even heavily confronted datasets are unlikely to meet the modern standards of anonymization set forth by the AVG, and that they will seriously challenge the technical and legal adequacy of the denial-and-forget model. ”
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Fun times, right? Whether you care about this or not – and I say this because I definitely know people who just throw their hands up in the air over data privacy, if they accept every service they use follows it to some extent – I still think it’s important to take control of your data where possible. It usually only takes a few minutes to sites and services you use. Eotherwise it feels like a fool’s errand –and will never really free you from the grip of ad tech –every little bit helps. Or, at least, it canwas not hurt.
To customize your ad-sharing settings on T-Mobile, the Uncarrier gives you two options:
- You can sign up via the My T – Mobile application or MyT – Mobile.com. Visit the tab MORE> Advertising and Analytics> Use my data to make ads more relevant to me in the T – Mobile app. Turn off the switch (gray) to stop using your data for ads. ”
- On MyT‑Mobile.com, click on the My Account> Profile> Privacy & Notifications> Advertising & Analytics> Use My Data to make ads more relevant to me drop-down menu. Turn off the switch (gray) to stop using your data for ads. ”
I do not own T-Mobile, so I can not give you more help than that (or screenshots). However, I’m definitely going to check out my ad settings at Verizon now, because you never know. The Wall Street Journal report discusses how you can adapt it, as well as the privacy settings for all the other major service providers, so it’s just as good as making sure you ‘ your information-‘anonymous“or not.