Epistemic Ingemination

:: Art, Science, Politics, Humor, Geekery: Randy Kirchhof's Weblog

NOTE: this blog is no longer active as of 12/07. New one: http://blog.kirchhof.com

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.

Home Page MySpace Page Shelfari Page Tips, Rants, etc: E-mail Randy

Thu, 22 Jun 2006

If you get your Internet connectivity through AT&T (formerly SBC, formerly Southwestern Bell, formerly AT&T) or surf on your Cingular or AT&T phone, or use your Comcast cable modem, your life changes tomorrow. That's when their new service agreement goes into effect.

SFGate:

The new policy says that AT&T—not customers—owns customers' confidential info and can use it "to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process."
The policy also indicates that AT&T will track the viewing habits of customers of its new video service — something that cable and satellite providers are prohibited from doing.

So, your name, address, stats, viewing habits, passwords, sites you visit, data you download, people in your address book, people who visit your web page, text messages, and everything else you do online can all be used "to protect" AT&T's "legitimate business interests." That's carte blanc to do anything that they damned well please with your life to further their own ends, and to hand whatever they feel like over to the government whenever they want. It is essentially you ceding all of your constitutional rights to AT&T so that you can use their network.

It can even be construed to mean that if you are using an AT&T ISDN line for your broadcast remote, they own your content.

If you use their service, you agree to their terms.

You might want to rethink your broadband or dialup connectivity. And be careful what you say in that text message until you find another provider.

[ Addendum: more here. ]

Posted at 09:23 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink] [Reload all] [E-mail]