The telco obviously learned nothing from this series of events, because it’s now openly acknowledging it will share personally identifiable information about subscribers with its newly acquired AOL division.
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“Of course plenty of sharing of intel on web users and their web usage already goes on within the ad industry – often lurking unspecified behind bland descriptors in privacy policies that might vaguely refer to data-sharing agreements with “third party providers” – so Verizon-AOL is by no means the only game in town”, said a TechCrunch story.
It’s likewise now conceivable to quit Verizon’s UIDH framework as well, because of reporting by ProPublica, which recently uncovered that the organization was all the while utilizing the identifier to track clients who had erased it.
In the a year ago it’s become known that Verizon uses “supercookies” (aka UIDH or Relevant Mobile Advertising) to track what its mobile customers are doing, but now it’s taking a step further by quietly linking that information to ads from AOL (the parent company of Engadget, which is also now owned by Verizon).
Verizon said that the information it will be opening up to AOL includes user email and postal addresses, as well as device and plan information and possibly collected data such as age and gender. “We require that these vendors and partners protect the information and use it only for the services they are providing us”.
It also quoted Verizon’s chief privacy officer, Karen Zacharia, as saying, “I think in a few ways it’s more privacy protective because it’s all within one company”. According to Pro Publica, AOL’s advertising platform runs on 40% of websites today. Verizon’s advertising program puts the lie to such pithy remarks. The move will bring together Verizon’s database of customer details and their online browsing data (tracked by the super cookie unique identifier code marks) to more accurately serve them appropriate adverts.
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Verizon says you are only part of Verizon Selects if you have joined or choose to opt in to Verizon Selects in the future. You need to opt-out if you do not want to be tracked, and especially given its lack of HTTPS protection, we’re figuring you should do that.
