�ֲ���ý

If you use AT&T, they are probably aware that you are reading this article right now, where you are reading it, what you click on before and after you read it, and storing all of that information to use in targeted marketing and advertising later on. It’s not just AT&T, either, but we’re sharing this info with you after a of AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson in Fortune magazine in which he openly laid out the mega-company’s plan to profile and target customers for advertising.

AT&T has transformed itself into a media colossus by buying Time Warner, adding to its incredible array of content from holdings including HBO, CNN, TNT, and others in combination with a huge distribution network across mobile broadband, DirecTV, and U-verse. Stephenson shared his vision of permanent, across-the-board surveillance of all those customers for extremely targeted – and personal – advertising.

In the Fortune article, an AT&T exec expands on how this will work:

“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.

For people who are concerned about privacy, this is pretty scary. AT&T has been to the government for years, Facebook exposing more than 50 million users to hackers gathering private information, and reports of data breaches every day, privacy is an issue that deserves more information and action. Especially when it comes to companies protecting their customer’s personal and private information.

Here at �ֲ���ý, we value the privacy of our customers and we do not disseminate customer information outside our company without a valid court order.  We don’t use it for advertising, marketing, or anything of the sort. That’s our guarantee to you.

To read our full privacy policy, you can click HERE, where you’ll see what kind of data we collect and how it is used. The bottom line is that everything we do is with a singular focus: to give you, our customer, the best possible high-speed internet experience available, without worry about the safety of your personal information.