Brooke: This is On the Media, I’m Brooke Gladstone. Last week in Kansas City, when AT&T rolled out its new high speed internet network, dubbed “GigaPower,” it made a lot of news. Most of it bad.
News anchor: AT&T for 29 bucks a month will keep your data private.
News anchor:That’s right, AT&T wants you to pay extra for your own privacy! The Telecom’s new superfast broadband will charge customers $29 a month more to keep their online searches secret.
News anchor: ATT wants users to pay more for privacy!
Indeed, if you sign up for AT&T’s GigaPower network--which boasts speeds up to 100 times that of the average provider--you’re also giving your consent for AT&T’s “Internet Preferences” program, which will collect your data, track your activity, and target advertising to you. If you’d rather not be tracked you can opt out...for the aforementioned extra 29 dollars a month. At least, that’s the story according to AT&T and the media. But actually, there’s a lot more to that story, according to Stacey Higginbotham, a writer for the tech site GigaOm. Including the price AT&T has set for its right to privacy.
Higginbotham: It’s not $29, it’s actually $44 or $66 depending on which plan you choose?
Brooke: So the media have been parroting AT&T's price without really checking it?
Higginbotham: Yes they have, although I don't blame them, because it's actually really hard to fact check AT&T in this situation. You would have to have an address in one of the 2 cities that AT&T is actually offering the GigaPower service - that's Austin or Kansas City. I actually live in Austin, but I can't actually use my own address, because I don't live on a street where AT&T offers the service so I had to call a friend who has GigaPower service and then look up an address near hers and use that address. So it makes it very difficult to even factcheck AT&T in this situation.
Brooke: So what exactly do you get if you pay the privacy fee and opt out. Are you then able to use the internet without any fear of data-mining or targeted ads, at least from AT&T, because I know they have no control over Google or Amazon or Facebook or any of those others.
Higginbotham: Not exactly. AT&T is still going to use your information that they get from you as a subscriber to market to you and try to get you to subscribe to other AT&T services. What you'll basically get is AT&T isn't going to monitor your web surfing and try to serve you ads based on your web surfing history.
Brooke: Now, getting a discount in exchange for getting targeted ads is not new. Amazon offers a discount on their Kindle tablets if you allow them to show you ads, but this is different, right, because it isn't a tablet or a streaming service, but access to the internet itself. Have we ever seen anything like this from an Internet service provider where you don't get a discount for allowing them to target ads, but you can pay them not to target ads to you.
Higginbotham: We haven't so far. And I really think this crosses a line. If you agree that internet service is a fundamental human right, AT&T is not in a competitive market.
Brooke: AT&T's GigaPower network is offered in some of the same cities as Google's Fiber Network, which provides the same high speeds without the privacy fee. Won't people just switch to Google if they don't want to pay for privacy?
Higginbotham: They will say that they're competing with Google, but we don't actually have proof because we don't collect this data. That AT&T competes head to head with Google at the street level, at the address and house level for gigabit service. So its not like I have a choice between giving up my privacy to AT&T or choosing Google, which doesn't ask me to give up my privacy.
Brooke: But don't you automatically give up your privacy when you use the Google service?
Higginbotham: Well see, that's the comparison that AT&T will try to get you to make. But it's fundamentally different. Because google does not inspect the bits as they flow over the internet from your house to other servers. Google doesn't spy on you in the same way that AT&T is offering to spy on you.
Brooke: It isn't really offering; it will spy on you unless you pay to get them to stop. So rather than it being our right to privacy, that they're asking to bypass, they're framing it as their right to follow us that we can buy back.
Higginbotham: Right. I look at it as an extortion. It's like ransoming your privacy for like 545-something dollars a year at a minimum. But I don't think that AT&T should get away with doing this unless its a truly competitive market and people have the option of another superfast broadband provider that doesn't offer this plan.
Brooke: It is ridiculously fast, right? 100 times the average broadband speed? Average consumers could make a choice just to do without that much speed!
Higginbotham: And many do. But, I was at CES, and they were showing off 4k televisions. And the minimum broadband speeds you need for 4k are 25 megabits per second. So if you look a household that has two or three 4k tvs, and people are watching all those televisions, you suddenly are looking at a household that needs about a hundred megabits per second connection, right?
Brooke: So if not today, then tomorrow.
Higginbotham: Very soon.
Brooke: Now, not everyone is upset about this policy. Your colleague, Jeff John Roberts, wrote an article applauding AT&T for being at the very least, transparent, and giving us a say in the matter. Other ISPs have the capacity to follow us in the same way. Isn't AT&T giving consumers a choice? Aren't they being out front about what they're doing?
Higginbotham: If you actually go to sign up for the service, you have to search to avoid this plan. At the bottom it is a tiny little footnote - "click here if you would like to learn more about plans without the internet preferences plan." AT&T says very few people are taking them up on the privacy option. Really, how many people are going to spend $44, or even $66 dollars extra a month on something as nebulous as privacy.
Brooke: Getting back to your colleague. He wrote that while the choice between money and privacy appears stark, the internet has always worked this way.
Higginbotham: But not at the ISP level. The fundamental distinction that we need to make is ISPs are a pipe that transmits these bits. And services like facebook and google before they became an ISP - they're web services. They're apps. And you can switch from them. They run on top of that pipe. And while it might be horrible to switch from facebook and you'd miss all your friends, there are other social networks. There's twitter, there's things like that. But you can't switch from your ISP. There's limited competition in this market, and this is - this is access to the internet. This is a basic right. So for them to be able to try to sell you access to your privacy - its a different game and its not one that we should be playing.
Brooke: Do you think this could set a precedent that other service providers like google could follow - just like with the airlines? Once you didn't have to pay for dinner, now you do, I mean, if they see that people are willing to pay...?
Higginbotham: If the FCC votes to implement title II and implement real net neutrality, then they have the option of stopping what AT&T is doing, because section 222 says that ISPs can't track people's private information.
Brooke: It always seems that when it comes down to a choice between privacy and convenience, Americans will choose convenience.
Higginbotham: I think that's true. I mean, there's plenty of studies showing that people will give you their social security number for a cookie.
Brooke: [laughs] What study is that!
Higginbotham: I will send you a link - because it exists.
Brooke: Stacey, thank you very much.
Higginbotham: You're welcome. Thank you for having me.
BACK ANNOUNCE: Stacey Higginbotham is a writer for the tech site, GigaOm, and host of the “Internet of Things” podcast. AT&T responded with this statement:
We offer our customers some of the fastest Internet speeds available and do so in a way that ensures they have a clear choice. Our pricing is clearly explained on our website. Under the current promotional offer we’re providing additional benefits and waiving certain costs, which is a common practice when providers launch new services. Since we began offering our tailored ad program more than a year ago, the vast majority have elected to opt-in.
(By the way, what AT&T is calling here tailored ad program, is the tracking program, the cheaper Internet preferences plan, that we’ve been discussing.)