If you subscribe to T-Mobile, you will soon be automatically enrolled in a program that will see your online and device usage data sold to advertisers. In an update of the privacy policy pointed out by Wall Street Newspaper, the operator said it would start sharing this information with marketing agencies as of April 26, unless customers give up. “We heard many say that they prefer more relevant ads, so we are adopting this setting by default,” a T-Mobile spokesman told WSJ. The new policy will include everyone who came to T-Mobile through the operator’s merger with Sprint in 2020. This is notable because Sprint previously allowed its customers to choose to share their data with advertisers.
T-Mobile’s decision to enroll as many customers as possible in a program that sells its data to advertisers runs counter to what we’ve seen from tech giants like Google and Apple recently. It was only earlier this month that the former said he would stop selling ads that depend on a person’s browsing history and would not build any cross-app tracking tools in the future. In the meantime, Apple will soon require developers to explicitly obtain a person’s permission before crawling them on websites and applications. It is even a step beyond the data collection that AT&T and Verizon (the parent company of Engadget) currently manage. Although both operators automatically enroll their subscribers in programs that bring them together in shared interest groups, such as an AT&T or Verizon customer, you don’t have to work hard to prevent your wireless operator from sharing more detailed information about you.
You can choose to exit the advertising program by opening the T-Mobile app on your phone, tapping the “More” tab and then going to the “Advertising and analytics” section. Toggle the toggle button next to the “Use my data to make ads more relevant to me” option to off.