Why You Should Opt Out of Sharing Data With Your Cell Provider

AT&T lost control of data of nine million customers. T-Mobile lost data belonging to tens of almost a hundred million customers. Other carriers have too.

All mobile providers collect a lot of data. Data for billing, data for profiling, data for selling ads. All kinds of data.

Location data. They know every cell site that your phone pings and many providers keep that data for years.

The AT&T breach – that wasn’t at AT&T; it was at a marketing vendor. Among the data shared was CPNI – Customer Proprietary Network Information. What does that include? For every call on your phone, the number, the time, the length of the call, cost, features, services, etc.

Oh, yeah. If you do anything else with your phone besides talk to your significant other and your boss, that is not considered CPNI and they are free to share it. That might include, say, text messages, Internet use, location data, just for example. Oh, yeah, also search history.

You can opt out of some of this data collection and each carrier handles it differently. Get the details on how to opt out and what you carrier shares in Brian’s article, linked below.

Not a great answer, but it is reality. Credit: Brian Krebs

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