Verizon Has A New Friend – The U.S. Senate

Well, maybe not a friend that you want to have, but they will likely get to visit the nation’s Capitol.

Verizon has gotten way more press than it would like by inserting super-cookies into it’s customers web traffic to allow folks like the marketing giant Turn to build dossiers on Verizon customers and then sell that information to advertisers in a thousandth of a second to the highest bidder.

Senators Bill Nelson of Florida, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Edward Markey of Massachusetts have asked the FTC to investigate whether Verizon’s use of super cookies violate FTC privacy rules.  These senators wrote Verizon a short note last week asking them a few questions, which Verizon said it would respond to.

The Senators want to know if legislation is required (I assume to regulate or outlaw this activity).

Advertisers are probably really, really mad at Verizon right now.

If Verizon had just done what AT&T did last year when they got caught doing this, the ad industry would not be getting all this unwanted attention.

When AT&T got caught doing this last year, they said it was just an experiment (yeah, right!), my bad, and we will stop doing this now.

Verizon, on the other hand said that no one would ever user our super cookies to track what users were doing.  Even though Turn, who was doing that exact thing, was a vendor to Verzion (must have been a different department).

Turn said that just because people were deleting their cookies didn’t mean that they did not want to be tracked.

If Verizon has just been a little smarter and taken the AT&T route and said sorry, this would all have gone away.

And six months later they could have re-contextualized the program and started it back up.

From my point of view, I am glad they were not being very smart.

Mitch

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