AT&T Launches New Privacy Policy — Same As Old, But Clearer
AT&T (NYSE: T) has issued a new privacy policy intended to be clearer and more explicit about the information the company collects and what it does with it. Dorothy Attwood, AT&T’s chief privacy officer, told the NYT that “this effort didn’t really change AT&T’s standard for how it handles customer information, but it did make the disclosure more explicit”. It also replaces a total of 17 different privacy policies from various AT&T subsidiaries.
Amongst the other things the policy explains is that AT&T has location information and uses it to show local ads when customer check yellow pages and use other services, that it buys information about its customers from credit bureaus and mailing list aggregators, and how it tracks users of its web sites and uses that data to target ads when the users are on other web sites. Customers can send an e-mail to request that AT&T not market to them by e-mail, telephone or postal mail and can request the billing information AT&T keeps about them. It’s also a fair bet that other telcos behave much the same when it comes to collecting and using information.
Not true. I filed a complaint to the state public utilities commission (PUC) last month about telemarketing. I had received months of telemarketing calls from AT&T agents, and then received calls on three consecutive evenings. Each call was the same with a delay and then someone connects reading a script. The calls were coming from a Phoenix outsource using autodialers. When I questioned the caller about really being AT&T, they read off billing information to try to prove being AT&T. My PUC complaint stopped the calls immediately. The CPNI on billing information had been removed. The outsourced vendor uses tactics like pretending to make a service call pr checking on my Internet connection to get around the Do Not Call Registry. An AT&T representative followed up on the PUC complaint stating that "it took 30 days for them to contact all their vendors." An AT&T customer has reason to doubt where their billing information has gone.