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Comment by tehwebguy | Hacker News Reader

This is incredibly disturbing, they need not inject a unique ID like Verizon’s, they can now do it all on the backend.

When I went to start streaming the world cup, AT&T took the initiative to "sign me in" to a third party (Fox) without asking for credentials or permission.

They know who you are. They know everywhere you go. And they are happy to spread what they know about you around.

When I used AT&T TV+internet a few months ago, this was still the old-style "click here to auth with your cable provider" -> [click the AT&T Uverse button] -> "thanks!" (they recognized I was on a hardwired AT&T connection so didn't require auth).

Is this something new? What was the flow? Do you have both AT&T internet + TV as well?

Have you used your login for any other TV service? The OTT industry has settled on a pretty broad single sign-on ecosystem. If you've logged into any OTT service with your crendentials, you likely don't need to do it again for any other service.

https://www.fiercecable.com/cable/tv-everywhere-starts-up-46...

No. I've got Firefox configured to nuke almost everything on restart, plus I run PrivacyBadger and uBlock Origin. This is not me overlooking an existing login.

(I also run a site-specific browsers via Chrome to isolate my Gmail login and keep Google from knowing who I am, I have no Facebook login, etc. I'm not serious enough to run a VPN or Tor, and my setup isn't enough to guard against browser fingerprinting, but I'm reasonably paranoid.)

If they're your ISP they own you.

Personally it's handy as my ISP lets me watch tv on any device on my home network. They did it badly because it breaks if I change the SSID.

But you're not truly paranoid unless you're using tor or a vpn to get away from your ISP's network. Your efforts mostly are an annoyance to yourself but no impediment to other.

Why is this bad? I’m on thier network, they know I’m a customer, why not sign me in.

I bought my dad a Roku TV for his birthday and the idea of having to go to website, login with his cable companies userid and password and then use the one time code displayed on his TV,confuses him to no end.

It would be "convenient" if AT&T's CEO were to appear in my boudoir tomorrow morning to give me a pedicure, comb my beard, spritz me with Axe Body Spray, and tie my bow tie. But before they decide to do that, I'd like a say in the matter.

How is this abt different than every corporate SSO ever?

Honestly, at this point I'm just waiting for the internet to implode so we can start something better. No more signing 'petitions' for me, which go straight to whatever senator's trash.

Or we could work to make sure that traffic is always encrypted. Solving the ISP knowing who your packets are going to is more difficult, but no longer having clear data passing back and forth should have been a solved problem by now.

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