AT&T Archives - John Sileo, Cyber Security Training

Posts tagged "AT&T"

Talking Surveillance Once Again–Know Your Phone Carrier More Precisely

When you log onto the Verizon Precision Market Insights website, the giant catch phrase that jumps out at you in bold red letters is:

“Know your audience more precisely.

Drive your business more effectively.”

Verizon is pulling no punches when it comes to letting advertisers know that they have valuable data- OUR data- and they’re willing to share it. For a price of course. Phone carriers, who see a continued decline in contract subscriber growth and voice calls, are hoping to generate new sources of revenue by selling the data they collect about us. They already collect information about user location and Web surfing and application use (which informs them about such things as travels, interests and demographics) to adjust their networks to handle traffic better. Now they have begun to sell this data.

Is Your Wireless Carrier Tracking Your Surfing Habits (Maybe)

Oh what your mobile phone carrier knows and tracks about you! A one-page document from the Justice Department‘s cybercrime division shows how cell phone companies record and retain your call and surfing activity (calls, text messages, web surfing and approximate location). Here’s a summary of how each company retains your information (full details in the image below):

Verizon Wireless – rolling one-year records of cell tower usage & what phone accessed what web site
AT&T / Cingular – ongoing records of cell tower usage since July of 2008
T-Mobile USA – doesn’t keep any data on Web browsing activity
Sprint Nextel’s Virgin Mobile – 3 month record of text content
Other than Virgin Mobile and Verizon, none of the carriers keep texts but they keep records of who visited a particular web site.
Verizon keeps some information for up to a year that can be used to ascertain if a particular phone visited a particular Web site