That's why it must really say something about these companies - Verizon especially - that them voluntarily stopping such a practice makes me imagine they have nefarious motives in mind.
Either that, or they just think net neutrality's death is going to be so much more profitable than this that it's not worth the man-hours anymore.
The thing people don't seem to realize is that it's not just enough to pay money for what you use. You have to pay more than $X + $Y, i.e. you have to explicitly price yourself out of the price bracket of customers who are willing to put up with being the product.
This means that services where users are a product are going to continue to be the norm as long as a significant fraction of consumers are willing to put up with it.
Generally, people are prohibited from reselling the things the common items of our existence: electricity, internet service, food, and so on. Businesses have no such restrictions, even though like food, personally-attributable information can be put to harm.
Get rid of the quarterly reporting and let businesses get back to competing on customer service and you'll see this all go away.
The degree of hubris and outright contempt for the public by corporatists is utterly disgusting.
1. You get hundreds of pages of contract to read about the phone and the service and billing and everything else. Who is going to spend a week doing a doc review to buy a phone?
2. It's opt out. GDPR got this right. Even if you do opt out, how do you know if they handle your PI correctly anyway? They get paid to abuse it and penalized to respect it.
3. And the big one is: there's no alternatives. IF all the carriers do this -- and why should we expect them to leave cash on the table -- then you can't shop by privacy. They're all take it or leave it, as disclosed in their PP.
https://www.verizon.com/about/privacy/vz-navigator-app-priva...
Which works fine for me, because I ain't ever opting in to that. And arguably, those who do opt-in are getting something for it. (Rewards.)
I remember when Verizon started booting Kyocera 7135 devices off their networks(even on contract) if they were under a "Minutes of use" data plan and offering an "upgrade" to Treos but only if you picked up a $50/mo data plan + renew your contract.
The ostensibly did this because the device was "causing compatibility issues", however no other carries with the same device did the same thing. Tons of posts on howardforums but not enough to cause a huge stir.
The whole process left such a sour taste in my mouth I'll never own a cell phone on Verizon again.
There are algorithmic methods available for estimating reading time. Taking 80% of that value (or whatever) could then be used as a conservative lower bound for how long someone must take reading a document before it can be reasonably asserted that someone could have "agreed" to anything. If you haven't spent at least some minimum amount of time reading the document, it should be assumed prima facie that a "meeting of the minds"[1] hasn't happened.
This would require much longer delays before sales/etc, which encourages companies to use shorter, easier to read legal documents.