I’m really glad I didn’t get FIOS

Especially after reading this:

Verizon Wireless has been subtly altering the web traffic of its wireless customers for the past two years, inserting a string of about 50 letters, numbers, and characters into data flowing between these customers and the websites they visit.

The company—one the country’s largest wireless carriers, providing cell phone service for about 123 million subscribers—calls this a Unique Identifier Header, or UIDH. It’s a kind of short-term serial number that advertisers can use to identify you on the web, and it’s the lynchpin of the company’s internet advertising program. But critics say that it’s also a reckless misuse of Verizon’s power as an internet service provider—something that could be used as a trump card to obviate established privacy tools such as private browsing sessions or “do not track” features.

Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, a technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wants Verizon to stop using the UIDH. “ISPs are trusted connectors of users and they shouldn’t be modifying our traffic on its way to the Internet,” he says. He calls the UIDH a “perma-cookie,” because it can be read by any web server that you visit and used to build a profile of your internet habits.

One thought on “I’m really glad I didn’t get FIOS

  1. Capitalists (corporations and their bankers) have no ethics. What motivates them is profit. They are constantly hunting and searching for new ways to make a buck. For Verizon that “means to an end” is the UIDH. If we as a society willingly accept that the only economic system available to us is the capitalist economic model of for-profit commerce then we will get what we deserve. In this case Verizon has determined that we deserve the UIDH customer tracking program. The NSA is spying on us, but so are the corporations and the political parties.

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