The Un-Carrier is apparently becoming less and less Un now that it's absorbed Sprint and no longer needs to act like a hungry underdog:
T-Mobile will automatically enroll its phone subscribers in an advertising program informed by their online activity, testing businesses’ appetite for information that other companies have restricted.
....A T-Mobile spokeswoman said the changes give subscribers advertising that aligns with their interests. “We’ve heard many say they prefer more relevant ads so we’re defaulting to this setting,” she said.
Uh huh. They're exhausted from fielding constant requests to please share app usage with anyone who wants it, so they're finally caving in to what today's consumers have loudly said they want. Either that or they're responding to the fact that they're now one of the Big Three and don't have to compete as hard as they used to. This means they can afford to try out some profit-friendly tweaks and see if it pisses off very many people.
In any case, you can always opt out from this. Naturally. And as the Un-Carrier, they surely make this easy. So, since I'm a T-Mobile subscriber, I decided to opt out. Here's how it went:
- Go to T-Mobile site.
- Log in to account.
- Dig up password since it's been years since I last used it.
- Stop! Password too old!
- That's OK, I'll keep it.
- Sending a 6-digit code to your phone. Please enter it below.
- Ding. OK, got it.
- Now change your password anyway.
- What?!? OK fine. Here's a new password.
- Account page pops up.
- Browse around for something that looks like it might be an opt-out.
- Hmmm. Change my plan. Add a person. Report stolen device. Manage add-ons. See latest deals. None of those seem very helpful. Keep looking.
- Ah. Up in the corner: Edit Profile Settings. Give it a try.
- Billing. Caller ID. Scroll. Language settings. Blocking. Scroll some more.
- Aha. At the very bottom, Privacy and Notifications. Click.
- Marketing Communications Preferences? Maybe. But no.
- Notifications? No.
- Last choice: Advertising and Analytics. Not sure what that is, but . . .
- Hooray! Turn off both "Use my data for analytics and reporting" and "Use my data to make ads more relevant to me." After all, who knows which one is really the opt-out?
All done. Wasn't that easy? Of course, T-Mobile's 80 million customers will never be informed of this change in the first place,¹ so most of them will be entirely spared the cognitive discomfort of deciding if they want to opt out. And for the few who do somehow learn about it and do want to opt out, they should have no trouble figuring out the EZ steps above. So why do douchenozzles like me keep making such a big deal out of this stuff?
¹Outside the confines of some new version of the T-Mobile privacy policy, that is.
Steps 1-7, maybe even 8-9, have nothing to do with T-Mobile making it hard to opt out of targeted ads. It’s reasonable for you to need to log into your account to change your account settings (you don’t want other people to have access to your account settings, right?) and it’s not T-Mobile’s fault you haven’t logged in for awhile (which generated all the password change issues).
Steps 10-19 demonstrated your point about it not being easy. No reason to embellish them with the unrelated issue that you haven’t logged in for awhile.
I think it's at least somewhat relevant to include those additional steps to access the opt-out, when the null hypothesis could be "opt-in is required for intrusive sharing of consumer data". Requiring opt-in for this kind of garbage should be part of any reasonable consumer privacy law.
Virtually no one ever looks at their phone's account page so anyone who wants to do this will end up slogging through every one of those steps.
T-Mobile (and Verizon) are also not publishing the fact that on certain phones 5G is chewing up battery power like crazy and they are even advising customers to turn it off and go back to 4G. I have and older phone that is not 5G capable but my daughters all have newer models and are really upset with both companies over this
Interesting--I'll have to keep an eye on that. My battery did seem to drain faster than usual. Looks like the towers in my area were just upgraded, so the 5G speeds are no longer around 20, but 60 to 120 ish (as good as or better than WiFi).
Of course, Android update and I finally turned on anti-virus...so not a clean test.
https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/why-are-carriers-telling-us-to-turn-off-5g
So T-Mobile automatically sends ADS to your PHONE?? (Or am I misunderstanding?)
I don't use any of the Big Three; on the advice of Consumer Reports and the Offspring, we went with Ting. No "plan", we're billed for actual usage and at surprisingly low rates.
As Consumer Reports noted, everyone who uses one of the major cell services hates it. If this whole "market" thing actually worked, the biggies would be rapidly losing market share until they improved. Instead, they get bigger, less responsive, more obtrusive, and expensive. Clearly worse.
So, if "The Market" (in whose name we prey) actually isn't the optimal way to allocate society's resources, then maybe all this blather about The Evils of Socialism is wrong, too?
I will be fifty in ten years, at which point, it's all Consumer Cellular to me.
"Three" seems to be a significant number when it comes to corporate consolidation in a sector. If you have three big companies dominating the sector, they can effectively engage in a degree of strategic non-competition in a way that four companies can not.
Kevin - are you by any chance taking advantage of T-Mobile's rate plan for those 55 and older?
Rick-
Kevin already has a promo plan (zoom in on his bill) you can't combine promo's on MOST cell phone plans.
The free market can't fail. It can only (ever) be failed.
I was looking at what was available at a local store, from my PC, and Google kindly let me know I visited there 3 weeks ago. Hmmm.... It must be those chips in the vaccine I haven't gotten yet.
I switched to Mint Mobile years ago. Uses T-Mobile network but none of this crap. I get 10GB/month for $20/month (and that's bumped up twice for the same price since I started. Originally it was 6GB/month).
When I got my iPhone 12, I swapped the SIM in and automatically got 5G, didn't even need to upgrade my SIM like a lot of companies are requiring. Also no extra fee for using 5G. And 5G was actually a decent bump up for me at home. Not screaming fast but 2x LTE speeds.
Only downside is you have to pay a year in advance to get that price. Not an issue for me, but if you can't afford a whole year in one go you can't get the best price.
I always assume that kind of opt out never really works and won't work until a law requires it and some company is heavily fined for violating it. How could anyone ever really know?
I actually prefer targeted ads. Not so much that I want every detail of my network and app usage shared, but it does annoy me to see ads for things I'll never ever buy.
I don't think we'll get movement on privacy rights until there's a very clear unwanted consequence of letting companies sell this data. I don't think you can get enough people to fight for privacy in the abstract.
Thanks for this. I use T Mobile prepaid (5 GB for $25/month) and the website for that is slightly different it seems. I searched around and turned off a few things. I didn't see anything specifically about ad targeting, but they do say that unless I opt out they sell my anonymous data to somebody or other. Of course I opted out.
Just how exactly is T-Mobile supposed to know enough about me to do any targeting? Are they tracking what tele-spammers call me or something?
If you ever use your browser or an app, then they've got your metadata. Especially, if you've been reading Wikipedia articles, then they know you're hanging out on Wikipedia even if the HTTPS encryption blocks them from seeing the specific pages.
CORRECTION: Sorry, "Especially" should have been "For Example".
Hey Kevin, take a look at https://www.mintmobile.com/plans/ I think you can save a bit per month on a MVNO...