Today’s criminal in the the world of mobile operators is T-Mobile. The “Uncarrier” does not give up a new pink mobile plan – iIt’s a little more worrying than that. to at least, if you care about T-Mobile’s data collection practices, and who shares this data with. (You should care a lot about that.)
Ca Drew FitzGerald of the Wall Street Journal write:
„Operator no. 2 in the US by subscribers said in a recent privacy policy update that if it does not give up, it will share data on the web and mobile applications of advertisers starting April 26. they enjoy cooking or are passionate about sports, the company said.
T-Mobile’s new policy will also cover Sprint customers acquired through the 2020 merger of carriers. Sprint previously distributed similar data only to customers who opted for its third-party advertising program. ”
Although T-Mobile tries to anonymize the data it packs and transmits to advertisers by encoding identification features, this does not mean that what you do and what applications you use are completely anonymous. Aaron Mackey, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who is later quoted in FitzGerald’s play, says he is a “Trivial” matter to reveal a user’s identity (and telephony practices) by comparing information with multiple data sets.
In 2019, researchers from two European universities discovered similarly. Their results, published in a paper entitled “Estimating the success of re-identifications in incomplete data sets using generative models”, found that “disidentification” or the alleged anonymity of a data set is not very useful when measured factors can identify individuals – either alone or when combined with other data sets.
“Using our model, we find that 99.98% of Americans would be re-identified correctly in any data set using 15 demographic attributes. Our results suggest that even large-sample anonymized datasets will not meet the modern anonymization standards set by the GDPR and seriously challenge the technical and legal adequacy of the model of release and forgetting misidentification. ”
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Fun times, right? Whether you care about it or not – and I say that, because I certainly know some people who just blow their hands about data privacy, assuming every service you use tracks them in a certain quality – I still think it’s important to take control of your data whenever possible. This usually only takes a few minutes the sites and services you use. Eif it feels like a fool’s mission …and will never really free you from the control of advertising technology –every little help helps. Or at least it’s like.I’m not hurt.
To adjust your T-Mobile ad sharing settings, Uncarrier provides you two options:
- “You can unsubscribe through the My T-Mobile app or MyT‑Mobile.com. In the T-Mobile app, go to the MORE tab> Advertising and analytics> Use my data to make ads more relevant to me. Turn off the switch (gray) to stop using your data for advertising. ”
- “On MyT‑Mobile.com, click the My Account> Profile> Privacy and Notifications> Advertising and Analytics drop-down menu> Use my data to make ads more relevant to me. Turn off the switch (gray) to stop using your data for advertising. ”
I don’t have T-Mobile, so I can’t give you more help than this (or screenshots). However, I’m definitely going to check my advertising settings on Verizon right now, because you never know. The Wall Street Journal report shows how to change them as well, as well as privacy settings for all other major operators, so now is as good a time as any to make sure you limit sharing your date-“anonymous” or not.