thewayne | Why you should opt out of sharing data with your mobile provider

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An excellent article on how your private data gets shared and what you can do about it.

The WHY you should is pretty simple: 9 million AT&T customers were compromised in a hack at an advertising affiliate, T-Mobile has had 70 million accounts compromised in the last decade or so, etc.

These data breeches are so common as to be ridiculous. And that information can be used against you in possible fraud schemes. As an article that I posted recently said, Americans lost a record amount to fraud schemes in 2022, and breeches like these help fuel said schemes.

The article explains how to opt-OUT of data sharing for the Big Three: AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/03/why-you-should-opt-out-of-sharing-data-with-your-mobile-provider/

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

ysabetwordsmith

Nice when you're allowed to opt out, but this is a post-privacy post-boundary society. More and more, there is either no opt-out at all, or the opt-out consists of "do without goods/services." They tell people to "be careful of your data" in the same way they tell women to keep their legs together: they don't really mean it, and that causes a lot of problems.

From:

thewayne

Excellent points. I read something similar where, IIRC, the FTC is trying to put into regulations that if you sign up for a service online, you should be able to cancel the service online. No having to call phones that are never answered or run you around a phone tree or shunt you to a 'retention specialist'.

From:

ysabetwordsmith

That would be nice. Too much of "customer service" nowadays is meant as the exact opposite. Not only is this harmful to customers, it's ruinous to the employees because getting paid to act like a robot and to hurt people is soul-destroying.

Suzette Haden Elgin pointed out another problem: when most customer service accounts are routed through other countries, callers develop a negative reaction to hearing foreign-accented English. Now consider that many doctors are also foreign-born, and you can see what a disaster that sets up. >_

From:

thewayne

I can agree that I much prefer a person who speaks perfect English if I'm needing to talk to someone at a company. Back 20some years ago I was working for a taxi company and I needed to reprogram a router to act as a bridge - it's a mode that is used to connect two WiFi routers across long distances so you can have a long internet connection without running cable. And I know networking: I was Cisco-certified as a network administrator. I'd call their tech support, and I would tell them I specifically need to configure this router as a bridge. And they'd try to talk me through setting it up as a router. It took me a good three or four days before I got ahold of someone who knew what bridging meant and helped me fix it. As far as doctors, I frequently aim for foreign ones, even if we have some language issues. They had to initially pass medical school in their country, then they had to pass the American medical boards again to practice here. With a few exceptions, I have found them to be very well-qualified.