Today’s culprit in the world of mobile providers is T-Mobile. T.he “Uncarrier” leaves no new pink mobile subscription – iIt’s a bit more disturbing than that. Bee at least, if you care about T-Mobile’s data collection practices, and who shares that data with. (You should really care.)
Like Drew FitzGerald of The Wall Street Journal writes
The No. 2 US provider by subscribers said in a recent privacy policy update that unless they opt out, it will share customers’ web and mobile app data with advertisers starting April 26. For example, the program could help advertisers with identify people who love to cook or are sporty, the company said.
T-Mobile’s new policy will also apply to Sprint customers acquired through the carrier merger in 2020. Previously, Sprint had only shared similar data from customers who signed up for the third-party advertising program. “
While T-Mobile tries to anonymize the data it packages and passes to advertisers by encoding identifying features, that doesn’t mean what you do and which apps you use are completely anonymous. Aaron Mackey, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who is later quoted in FitzGerald’s paper, says it is a “trivial matter to reveal a user’s identity (and telephone practices) by comparing the information from multiple datasets.
In 2019, researchers from two European universities discovered the same thing. Their results, published in a newspaper titled ‘Estimating the Success of Re-identifications in Incomplete Data Sets Using Generative Models’, found that ‘de-identification’, or the perceived anonymity of a data set, is not very useful when the measured factors can distinguish individuals. alone or in combination with other datasets.
“With our model, we find that 99.98% of Americans would be correctly re-identified in each data set using 15 demographics. Our results suggest that even heavily sampled anonymized datasets are unlikely to meet the modern anonymization standards set forth by the GDPR and seriously question the technical and legal suitability of the de-identification release-and-forget model. “
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Fun times, right? Whether you care about this or not – and I say so, because I definitely know people who throw their hands in the air about data privacy, assuming every service they use tracks them in some capacity – I still think it’s important to take control of your data whenever possible. This usually only takes a few minutes on the sites and services you useE.if it feels like a silly message-and will never really free you from the grip of ad technology-every little bit helps. Or, at least, it approxno pain.
To adjust your ad sharing settings on T-Mobile, the Uncarrier gives you two options
- “You can unsubscribe via the My T – Mobile application or MyT‑Mobile.com. In the T – Mobile app, go to the MORE tab> Advertising & Analytics> Use my data to make ads more relevant to me. Turn off the switch (gray) to stop using your data for ads. “
- On MyT‑Mobile.com, click the My Account drop-down menu> Profile> Privacy & Notifications> Advertising & Analytics> Use My Data to Make Ads More Relevant to Me. Turn off the switch (gray) to stop using your data for ads. “
I don’t have a T-Mobile myself, so I can’t help you more than that (or screenshots). However, I’m definitely going to check my ad settings with Verizon right now because you never know. The Wall Street Journal report describes how to adjust those too, as well as the privacy settings for all other major providers, so now is a good time to make sure you’re sharing your data-anonymous” or not