Today’s offender at the the world of mobile operators is T-Mobile. The “Uncarrier” is not dropping a new pink cell phone plan – iit’s a little bit more worrying than that. At the at least, if you care about T-Mobile’s data collection practices, and who shares it data with. (You must be very concerned about this.)
As Drew FitzGerald of The Wall Street Journal he writes:
“The second operator in the United States by subscribers said in a recent privacy policy update that, unless they choose not to, they will share data from web and mobile application customers with advertisers starting April 26. For example, the program can help advertisers identify people who like to cook or are sports enthusiasts, the company said.
T-Mobile’s new policy will also cover Sprint customers acquired through the merger of operators in 2020. Sprint previously shared similar data only from customers who opted for its third-party ad program. “
Although T-Mobile tries to anonymize the data it packs and passes it on to advertisers by encoding identifying characteristics, it does not mean that what you do and what applications you use are completely anonymous. Aaron Mackey, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who is later quoted in the FitzGerald article, says he is a “trivial matter to reveal a user’s identity (and phone practices) by comparing multiple data sets of information.
In 2019, researchers from two European universities discovered something similar. Their results, published on a paper entitled, “Estimating the success of re-identifications on incomplete data sets using generative models”, found that “de-identification”, or the supposed anonymity of a data set, is not very useful when the measured factors can isolate individuals, whether by themselves or when combined with other data sets.
“Using our model, we found that 99.98% of Americans would be correctly identified in any data set using 15 demographic attributes. Our results suggest that even anonymized data sets with large sampling probably do not meet the modern standards of anonymity established by the GDPR and seriously challenge the technical and legal adequacy of the model for releasing and forgetting to disidentify ”.
G / O Media can receive a commission
Fun times, huh? Whether you care about it or not – and I say this, because I definitely know some people who just throw their hands in the air over data privacy, assuming every service they use tracks them in some way – I still think it’s important to take control of your data whenever possible. This usually takes just a few minutes to do at websites and services you use. ANDeven if it sounds like a silly mission –and will never truly free you from the clutches of advertising technology –every little bit helps. Or at least cadon’t hurt.
To adjust your advertising sharing settings on T-Mobile, Uncarrier offers two options:
- “You can cancel using the My T – Mobile or MyT‑Mobile.com app. In the T – Mobile app, visit the MORE tab> Advertising and analytics> Use my data to make ads more relevant to me. Turn off the button (gray) to stop using your data for advertising. “
- “On MyT‑Mobile.com, click on the My Account drop-down menu> Profile> Privacy and notifications> Advertising and analytics> Use my data to make ads more relevant to me. Turn off the button (gray) to stop using your data for advertising. “
I don’t have T-Mobile, so I can’t give you any more help than that (or screenshots). However, I will definitely check my advertising settings at Verizon now, because you never know. The Wall Street Journal report covers how to adjust them too, as well as the privacy settings of all the other major carriers, so now is as good a time as any to make sure that you’re limiting the sharing of your Dice-“anonymous” or not.