AT&T wants to know: how much would you pay for a little online privacy? | Dan Gillmor

AT&T's 'Austin offer' gives customers two options: higher price, more privacy. Or lower price, but your online movements tracked

What's one piece of your privacy worth? About a dollar a day, suggests telecom giant AT&T.

The company's latest internet service offering in Austin, Texas comes in two flavors. The company might as well call them the "some privacy" and "no privacy" services. The cheaper version gives customers a discount in return for being targeted more intrusively than ever by user-specific advertising.

Let me explain: the company's Austin experiment is a test to see what a specific market will bear in highly specific conditions. AT&T is offering some Austin neighborhoods its "U-verse with GigaPower" product, which comes in $99 per month "standard" and $70 per month "premier" editions, the latter requiring an agreement to let AT&T "use your individual web browsing information, like the search terms you enter and the web pages you visit, to tailor ads and offers to your interests".

The trial highlights several realities about internet service in America. First, of course, is the relatively low speed and high cost of most service, due to the so-called "marketplace" of just one or two providers in most cities. AT&T's Austin offering is 10 times the speed of the comparable Comcast service where I live, at about the same price. Why? Competition, which barely exists elsewhere in the US. This is plainly a response to Google's upcoming fiber-to-home product in Austin, as opposed to any serious move by the telecom company to innovate on price or service.

The AT&T website is quite vague about what the company actually plans to do in its surveillance of customers' web use, and how it will conduct that surveillance in the first place. Their promise:

[AT&T] will not collect information from secure (https) or otherwise encrypted sites, such as when you enter your credit card to buy something online or do online banking on a secure site.

Interesting wording, because it suggests AT&T could choose to do otherwise, but unless it's hacking basic security systems, that shouldn't be possible in any case.

Encryption is the easy dodge for customers who want to get the lower price and thwart AT&T's extra surveillance, of course. A customer could simply use a virtual private network (VPN), which creates an encrypted tunnel for all data. Will AT&T permit this? There's no hint in the terms of service.

Nonetheless, what AT&T is doing has one real virtue: telling customers explicitly that they will trade money for privacy. In an internet economy today where we are given few if any choices of this sort, that's progress of a kind.

Google and other major internet companies have made it clear that our use of their services is free only in one narrow sense. As the saying goes, we, the users, are the product being sold to others – mainly advertisers – and we have absolutely no control over the data being collected, massaged, bartered, and sometimes abused.

AT&T's isn't the first to foray in this area. Internet service providers have been looking for years to find ways to leverage their unique hold over customers – their ability to probe what we do and make money off it, despite the blatant invasion of privacy that represents. US and British telecom companies have experimented with the "phorm" product that snooped on browsing habits, one of several such attempts over the years.

This kind of thing should clearly not be permitted, period. ISPs should provide one service only: the connection and the data. Yet the AT&T Austin offering does suggest ways we could encourage other kinds of providers to behave better. If Google et al offered paid services that guaranteed no snooping on my data, I'd be much happier about using them.

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