verizon in home agent just takes me to verizons website

Verizon’s FAQ stresses that advertisers don’t actually see who its customers are, because it anonymizes the data provided through its “Relevant Mobile Advertising” and “Verizon Selects” programs.

(The latter happens to lead the industry in its proportion of over-$100-monthly subscribers.) Sprint and T-Mobile, meanwhile, don’t engage in this tracking at all - even though they make a lot less money than AT&T or Verizon. But AT&T has implemented what it describes as a test of a possible advertising service in a more polite manner.Īlthough it’s not obvious from that company’s privacy-policy page, you can click a button at an opt-out page ( ), and then confirm at White and Access’ test pages that you no longer have tracking headers stapled to your traffic. White’s site soon revealed that AT&T was also injecting these headers. Verizon says that’s not a risk because its headers change “frequently.” But it won’t say exactly how often they change or by how much.Īnd as Hoffman-Andrews ( mentioned earlier here as a developer of the BlockTogether anti-harassment Twitter app) wrote in that EFF post, it’s trivial to link one header ID to its replacement by using other Web-tracking technologies like cookies.Įverybody else does not do the same thing Which, as White emphasized in an email, is “broadcast to every site and app service that users visit,” except encrypted connections. But note that this doesn’t stop Verizon from inserting the identifying headers into your Web traffic, it just tells it to not use the data. You can opt out of that demographic and interest-based targeting by logging into your account’s privacy settings on the Web, using the My Verizon app on some phones, or by calling 86. In a frequently asked questions page, Verizon says this system lets “select ad technology partners” target ads to “groups of customers … based on demographic and interest based information.” But if the site you’re visiting doesn’t put that little lock icon in the browser toolbar, and you’re accessing it over Verizon’s wireless network, then it’s tracking you. Only sites that encrypt the connection between them and your browser can thwart this “header injection.” That includes most email, social media, and financial sites (as well as Yahoo Tech, so your emoji fascination is safe from Verizon’s scrutiny). The tech-policy lobby Access has since posted, which goes easier on the jargon but takes an extra click. You can consult specialized test pages that check for this tracking - for example, security researcher Kenneth White’s /sniff. You can’t see this on your smartphone or tablet, but the website you visit can read that UIDH and know you by it, even if you’re browsing in incognito mode. For example, a Verizon LTE hotspot I’m testing has each request for a webpage silently stamped with 60 characters of gobbledygook beginning with “MTIxNzE0.” How can Verizon do this? When it relays an address request from a device on its network (your phone, for example) to a website you’re visiting, it adds a “Unique Identifier Header,” or “UIDH,” that ties the request to your account. Those are the basics of the outrage over the discovery that Verizon Wireless is tagging most of its subscribers’ Internet traffic with individual identifiers as part of an advertising initiative.Īs the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jacob Hoffman-Andrews wrote Monday, this Verizon tracking “effectively reinvents the cookie, but does so in a way that is shockingly insecure and dangerous to your privacy.” What if the one company that stays with you wherever you go on the Internet - that is, your Internet provider - started inserting cookies in your webpages and could track your online habits for marketing purposes?

Verizon in home agent just takes me to verizons website