UPDATED 13:45 EDT / OCTOBER 18 2012

NEWS

Why is Verizon Capturing All Customer Data and Recording Usage?

Verizon Wireless is proudly saying that it knows everything (read again, everything!) about its customers, their habits, gender, age, interests, and most demographic details. It’s because the telecom company is monitoring the app and data usage, and browsing habits of its customers. On the top of that, it has started selling the data to marketers for marketing purposes, which sounds simply weird. According to Verizon Wireless, it may link the data to third-party databases with information about customers’ gender, age, and even other details like if they are sports enthusiast, frequent diner or pet owner.

“We’re able to analyze what people are viewing on their handsets. If you’re at an MLB game, we can tell if you’re viewing ESPN, we can tell if you’re viewing MLB, we can tell what social networking sites you’re activating, if you’re sending out mobile usage content that’s user-generated on video,” said Bill Diggins, U.S. chief for the Verizon Wireless marketing initiative at an industry event sponsored by PricewaterhouseCoopers in Los Angeles.

While Verizon may be truly excited about what it is doing, not everyone really feels like that. For instance, Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco says that a wireless carrier that discloses information about which URLs a customer visits could run afoul of the Wiretap Act.

The telecom company declined to comment on working of its technology, but gave following statement,

“Verizon is committed to customer privacy and takes the issue seriously. The Precision program complies with the law and protects the privacy of our customers. The reports available through the program will not disclose the content of specific customer communications because each report will contain aggregate data from a large number of customers to protect privacy. Customers who do not want their data used as part of the program can opt-out at any time.”

Verizon is indulged into kind of shallow packet inspection (or deep?), as it tracks which mobile apps customers are using and which URLs are visited typically by them. Even Ryan Radia, associate director of technology studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute think tank, agrees with the EFF’s Fakhoury that disclosing aggregated URLs visited can be legally risky.

So, the irony is that while Verizon is boasting the acquisition of customer data and this may take an ugly turn at some point, as customers may not want to be wiretapped. Moreover, this may turn into a legal conflict as well, just like we have seen so many times in the past. Remember the 2003 In Re Pharmatrak decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit?


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