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What really frustrates me is I had already turned off all of the "personalized advertising" toggles I could find prior to this. But I log in to turn these off and the ones I'd touched before were back on.

Increasingly, the "if you're not paying then you're the product" saying is bunk. I am paying, almost $400 per month, for quite a few SIMs to be active on T-Mobile's network yet that's not enough. They have to harvest data about me for even more.

(Don't come at me with the "a company is legally required to take in all of the money it possibly can for its shareholders" bit. Nothing says a company can't make a reasonable business decision to leave money on the table.)

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I noticed the same thing: I opted out (both analytics and ads options) a few months ago when I switched to T-Mobile. They since ignored my preferences and opted me back in. Unbelievable. I don't even know when they did this.

Do I now have to keep checking on these settings??

Changing privacy preferences without my knowledge or permission must be made illegal. Total FB like move.

Also, I'm generally tired of this concept of "ads relevant to me" BS.

Except Facebook had respected every single privacy toggle I ever set when I had my account.

I looked this morning expecting to find an additional toggle and found several settings I thought were toggled off were toggled on. I was thinking this was an oversight on my part until I saw this thread, but now I’m not so sure.

I'm pretty sure Facebook is really careful around this stuff. it's illegal for them to ignore your previously made privacy choices. Facebook can't afford to break the law in such an obvious way.

No, I’m going to give them full kudos here, not the cynical “they have to be careful because reasons” type of kudos, but the full-bodied rich in flavor type of kudos. I created my account in 2007 and would regularly check the privacy settings every time they made a change of any kind up to the point I stopped using and later removed the account over a decade later.

Not one privacy setting that I exerted manual control over ever changed out from under me. Whatever controversies they came under in that time with all the additional accompanying scrutiny, this aspect never changed. Perhaps there are counter examples out there, but that’s how it was for me.

FB is more careful about privacy than 98% of companies their size.

Do there exist 50 companies their size for that number to make sense?

I'd slightly modify that: FB is careful about privacy law, but its business model is about extracting private data.

One example: The NYTimes will sell your name + home address to other advertisers to send you mail. FB does not share your personal information with anyone, it just lets people serve ads to you on the platform based on it.

They are careful about privacy when you are careful of your own. There are millions of users who do not change the default settings.

Maybe recently, but early last decade (2010-ish) they didn't. It's why I haven't had a Facebook account since then. After opting out of sharing my data, I would see my data (namely, my Facebook friends likes) pop up on third-party websites.

All of those asinine social widgets were loaded straight from Facebook.com, so it was less a case of sharing your info as it was if you were signed into Facebook, then those widgets would behave as if they were on Facebook and not a third party site.

I also don’t recall if there were settings for those things, probably not because learning how else Facebook used those widgets to profile me was what prompted me to quarantine Facebook to Chrome, blacklist Facebook’s domains in NoScript and reduce then eliminate my usage.

Me three. I definitely have opted out of analytics and ad tracking before, but I just rechecked my settings in the T-Mobile app and both were enabled. What a slimey thing for them to do.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a better cell carrier in the US?

Yuck. I just switched to them from Verizon who I left for scummy business practice. On to the next carrier, AT&T.

AT&T is the absolute worst of the three IMO. Poorest offering, highest cost.

Their prepaid plan is only $25/mo w/ 8gb lte when prepaid the year in advance. That's wayyy cheaper than any of the other big players, and their network/coverage is supposed to be better than t-mobile (and almost as good as verizon).

>That's wayyy cheaper than any of the other big players

T-Mobile has a $15/mo prepaid plan without having to pay a year in advance.

I'm using Mint, but they only do phones, so you can't bundle with stuff like tv or internet

I mean, the same can be said about T-Mobile, which to my knowledge offers neither of those things (unless you count the free Netflix).

They recently introduced their own cable-TV-like streaming service.

T-Mobile currently offers home internet access in some areas, and they have a new streaming video service called TVision.

Huh. Guess I learn something new every day.

I rarely hear of people who are happy with their cell carrier regardless of where they're from. In Germany we have three major providers: Telekom (the parent company of T-Mobile), Vodafone and o2 (which belongs to Spanish Telefonica). By all accounts they're all terrible from a customer service perspective.

I just had o2 renew my contract rather than cancel it as I explicitly demanded and it took me a week of regular calls to customer service to get it fixed. I want to switch but it feels like I am between the devil and the deep blue sea.

It's why I get everything on monthly pay as you go only. I'm not sure of the utility of a contract from the consumer perspective. The only thing it does is reduce your flexibility.

It does do another thing: it gives you access to a better deal, generally speaking. But I'm also considering biting that bullet.

fwiw the "better deals" build their value proposition on buying a new phone every two years and smuggle the price of the phone into your tax deductibles. generally the deals are mid- to high-tier priced but have good overall value if you want video on the go and are complicit with beeing a part in the hardware churn industry.

on the other side you get low-end deals w/o contract for <100euro per year (call/sms flatrate plus some data) if you bring your own phone.

Phone purchases outside of a contract are also partially tax deductible if used for your job in Germany. And while many deals are attractive only if you buy a device, not all of them are. Right now I could get a 24 month contract from Vodafone for an average price of 12 EUR/month with 20GB of mobile data.

On the other hand, Lidl Connect (which uses Vodafone's network) charges 12.99 EUR/4 weeks for 6GB of data w/o contract. If you know of any non-contract options that offer significantly better value, please do let me know.

It really depends how you use your data but I never use more than the 10gb that I pay for so having more data isn’t an attraction. I also buy a new (to me) second hand iPhone every 2 years and the phones are perfectly good.

WinSIM is 7.99€/6GB, PremiumSIM 8.99€/6GB, both with month-to-month contracts. Not sure which networks though.

winsim is drillisch, which is just about starting its own network, mostly resells telefonica like most cheap options (incl. premiumsim).

idk but everytime i call someone and the call quality is abysmal, that person is on telefonica network.

I've been happy with Drillisch, but to be fair I call very rarely and even then it's a Telegram/WhatsApp call.

yea, that vodafone deal sounds good value if you need the data.

guess im an outlier because i rarely use more than a few hundred MB a month, so even 12e/mon is "too damn high".

That's fair. I don't always need that much data, but I need it often enough that it's worth having it and not having to worry about it, e.g. when visiting family who don't have internet at home, just working outside or traveling.

I've also been in the situation of not having non-mobile internet at home and I had to deal with insufficient data caps for years, so I may also be biased towards avoiding that in the future.

Germany has a wealth of minor providers, thanks to the MVNO system. No reason whatsoever to be on a major cell provider when a small one is fraction of the price and cancellable monthly instead of yearly.

Unfortunately, T-Mobile's probably the "least bad" of the Big Three. Maybe one of the smaller carriers running on the Big Three's towers?

I was really happy with Republic Wireless, and would still be using them, though am currently on ATT due to circumstances.

Unfortunately, they are being purchased by DISH network.

I switched from republic to Mint sim (now mint mobile) a few years ago and haven't looked back.

I’d recommend looking into Verizon’s discount carrier Visible. I switched a few months ago and am very happy. With “party pay” each member of a party pays their own bill. If your party is 4 or more, you get unlimited calling, text, and data for $25/mo. You can also turn your phone into a hotspot but are limited to 5mbps. Since the network is still Verizon, I still get great service but no longer need to pay a premium price.

I assume any traffic from an MVNO is lower priority than from an Verizon/ATT/T-Mobile payer, simply because in a congestion situation it makes sense to me that the mobile networks would prioritize whoever they get more money from.

I wonder how true that is.

As a Visible customer, I can say the speeds are downgraded. It used to be that if you made it down to 5Mbps, you'd have to call them and your speed will go back up to ~25Mbps. The last few calls have resulted in no speed increases. Time of day doesn't matter so I don't believe their congestion story. They do allow for tethering one device. It's only $40/month and works out well if you just need a slow connection at some location.

That's true, MVNO and prepaid are often deprioritized from the start, while postpaid gets deprioritized only after consuming say 22 GB/month.

And the other trade-off is the "real customers" get to roam on other telco's towers (in some scenarios, depending on partnership agreements), while MVNO and/or prepaid often don't.

I agree, thanks for the help. I am glad I unchecked them again.. As its been said before, we need better privacy laws. We could start with opt in being mandatory for specific services. Start with telecoms. If they were using AI to listen in and process voice 'data'.. I don't know. Sure I would hear the good old, if ya got nothing to hide..

I've had good results with Ting since 2016, and their telephone and chat customer service in particular has been excellent, but Dish recently bought them to rebrand as "Dish Mobile" and I don't know how that's going to play out.

Their staff on Reddit are denying this applies to them.

I assume by "this" you mean the latest Tmo privacy abuse, and I wouldn't expect it to apply to Ting. They're a Tmo MVNO, but all that means is that they resell Tmo's wireless backhaul; they are under no obligation to otherwise treat their customers the way Tmo does, and in my experience, they don't.

Ting's privacy policy says this about it, and has done since I've been a customer:

"We do not sell or share your information with any third-parties so they can market to you."

Visible. $25/month and they use the term "Unlimited" literally. No throttling after a certain amount used. 5G included, but it's always throttled at 200Mbps. Verizon network. I normally get 30-40Mbps on 4G.

Only downsides are US/Mexico/Canada only and it's pay as you go but you can't pay more than a week before the bill is due. Autopay is an option.

I have one line for my phone and one I use for home internet.

They do throttle tethering to 5Mbps, but that's easy enough to work around by making the TTL of the device you need full speed match the TTL of the phone by the time it gets there. (68 IIRC) For example, the connection I'm using now is desktop->router->linux box->phone, so I set my desktop TTL to 71.

I have no idea how bad they are with data collection, though.

Visible is owned by Verizon but they try to hide that fact.

From above the fold at visible.com:

"And we're the wireless service that gets better with friends. For as little as $25/mo, you’ll get unlimited data, messages and minutes—powered by Verizon, now with 5G included. Oh, one last thing: Every time you refer a friend, you’ll get a month of service for $5."

That says powered but it's actually owned, not an innocent MVNO

Consumer Cellular

You don’t really have any options because US society heavily favors corporations over human beings. Always has, always will.

The answer seems to be "yes", for several reasons:

1) I also once changed my privacy preferences, but have since been opted back in. 2) I wouldn't have even known to check were it not for Hacker News, which is _not_ how I, nor hopefully anyone, would want to be notified of changes to my/their T-Mobile account. 3) I'm greeted with a generic "Update Operation Failed" when I try to opt any of the lines on my account back out, so now I have even less faith that my changes will stick.

Vote with your $$$. Get a new mobile network.

Hard to do when "# of alternative networks" is tending asymptotically to zero.

It's weird/sad how the land of capitalism is trending towards the land of monopolism.

that is what capitalisim is.

that's what socialism is (well, if they're govt controlled or effectively govt controlled). real capitalism encourages competition, and real entrepreneurs try to discourage it and gain an effective monopoly. that tension is part of the beauty of the whole thing, but when govt approves these mergers with government granted monopolies (i.e., the wireless spectrum), then it all goes to pot very fast.

Under "real" capitalism, the general idea is that monopolization would indeed occur sooner, as the oversight that the government would have would lack to exist.

The Sprint/T-Mobile merger that was proposed a decade ago was denied by the FTC. The recent merger was allowed by the FTC, thus reducing our number of cellular companies.

> real capitalism encourages competition

If you mean “the real system first described as ‘capitalism’”, no, it doesn’t.

If you mean “the abstract, never realized ‘ideal’ system that defenders of capitalism appeal to whenever criticism is levelled at real-world capitalism”, that's harder to assess since the descriptions of that system tend to be both internally inconsistent and incomplete. But nothing usually hear in those encourages competition, usually it's defenders just assert as an article of faith that restriction of competition requires active cooperation of government.

Real capitalism has never been tried!

Switch to Boost mobile, this is an all-new provider.

In the US, Boost is an MVNO reselling T-mobile.

No, it is not. Dish Acquired Boost mobile and is building out its own nationwide network.

This says they are using the T-mobile network: https://about.dish.com/2020-07-01-DISH-enters-retail-wireles...

As part of the T-Mobile/Spring merger T-Mobile agreed to give Boost access to its network while Dish builds its own 5G network. This information is everywhere on the internet.

https://fortune.com/2021/03/04/dish-5g-mobile-cheapest-servi...

Even the article you posted mentions this in the headline. I have no idea why you feel the need to be so disingenuous.

Who's being disingenuous? You both seem to be basically correct. They're new, they're building out, but currently they resell.

Communicate with your wallet.

> Increasingly, the "if you're not paying then you're the product" saying is bunk. I am paying, almost $400 per month, for quite a few SIMs to be active on T-Mobile's network yet that's not enough. They have to harvest data about me for even more.

I think the corrected slogan would be:

If you're not paying, you're certainly the product. If you are paying, you still might be.

The slogan is correct. But your version is probably easier to interpret correctly by most people.

Paying a company doesn’t meaningfully affect their incentives to sell your information or not.

At this rate, the saying might as well be "if you don't own the company, you're the product". I can't imagine this sort of scumbaggery would fly with a carrier that's, say, a customer-owned cooperative.

who owns any of those companies? the shareholders. are they treated any better?

the issue is the spectrum auctions.. a new carrier can't even get off the ground, even if they were willing to fight through the morass of local and competing regulations to put up towers etc.

> who owns any of those companies? the shareholders. are they treated any better?

They don't have to be, because shareholders and customers are two separate groups when it comes to traditional corporations. And even where they intersect, if dividends and growing stock prices outweigh any personal harm done to themselves as customers, they're going to take the money, every time.

> Increasingly, the "if you're not paying then you're the product" saying is bunk

It was always bunk, even for free services. Just because a company offers something for free doesn't mean they should get a free pass to abuse users.

It's in this weird corporate apologetic vein where people try to find ways to blame users for a company's wrong doings.

But here we are. We collectively said it's cool to do if the product is free. And that shifted the privacy overton window.

I've never interpreted that saying as a justification. It's a warning. Like, "Beware, if they're not charging you, then they're selling you".

It's not bunk, it's a good reasoning.

The reason it's "increasingly...bunk" now is that the implication--that paying prevents this--is turning out to be wrong.

You're the product, even if you're paying.

> It's a warning.

That was the genesis of the phrase, yes. As a kind of corollary to caveat emptor. Yet it doesn't serve that function in practice, because in context it sneakily redirects blame onto the "emptor".

Take this hypothetical discussion, for example.

> Comment: I think Facebook spying on users is a gross invasion of privacy and we should advocate for better privacy laws.

> Top Reply: If you aren't the customer, you're the product.

In reading that, the reply doesn't read like a warning. It instead shifts the focus away from Facebook being responsible for invading people's privacy, and towards blaming people for using Facebook because they should have known better. Caveat emptor.

It's been an insidious scourge on serious discussions of privacy since its inception.

Yeah, you're right. I've seen that comment exchange too many times, with the smug undertone of "haha, you're the dumbass for having a FB account".

I can confirm this, I had already opt-ed out before. It appears they have reset my choice. What a way to build trust with your customers.

> "if you're not paying then you're the product" saying is bunk

The saying should be, "if the company is not subject to strong consumer protection laws that are enforced with large punishments, you are the product".

It is upsetting, but even more annoying is that I do not see opt-out anywhere. I am basically reliving Arthur Dent's adventure, where company can simply say "It is right over there"( buried under a pile of online forms in a never used obscure platform that requires eye scan to submit a request to respect your information ).

I just confirmed the same thing: all of my lines had silently been reset to sharing data with advertisers.

It's been a bad saying for a long time.

People (and laws, at least in many places) just don't care enough about this stuff. It's just an extra revenue stream, it's there, and it doesn't really cost you much to tap it. Bury some opt-out in some onerous process and you're covered (if even that is required) and people mostly won't complain too much, and will actually change their behavior less. Taking it lets you compete more on things people do care about, or helps you pad the bottom line.

For actual change here we need either regulations with teeth, or consumer behavior to change enough that there's a real cost to doing this stuff. Probably both. To a significant extent there aren't necessarily competitors for people to switch to in a lot of areas that are meaningfully better on privacy, and (relatedly) people often don't actually know or notice what these companies are doing, so it's tough to have "market forces" do much even if people did care.

Every single one of my credit/debit cards has an annual privacy notice. Every time I sign up for a card I call the line and opt-out of the sharing that they are required to let me opt-out of. The setting is retained and while the notices get sent every year, I don't have to opt-out again. Where was the notice even sent for this? Was there one? When I initially saw this reporting I figured 'Ah, they are expanding sales for earlier opted-in customers, better remind others to opt out that care about this'

I share your anger.

I got a text message on February 24:

"T-Mobile: We're updating our Terms & Conditions. To learn more: t-mo.co/terms20"

Interesting, I don't have any message like that on any of my lines. What state are you in, CA?

I've been popping off on Twitter for a bit and it appears T-Mobile extends CCPA law benefits to all 50 states and DC/PR, they dropped this link to me: https://t-mobile.static.services.wirewheel.io/

My guess is they prioritize notifying customers in states that have stronger privacy laws.

I just tried this and it's pretty nuts. First of all, their implementation of reCaptcha just didn't work at all for me in Firefox, and I had to switch to Chrome to even submit the request. (Captchas on CCPA request forms? Seriously?) Then, in order to verify my identity, I was asked to submit a copy of my driver's license or passport plus a current photo within 24 hours (after 24 hours I'd have to start over). I haven't made a ton of CCPA requests (probably 10 or so) but this one is by far the most onerous (not to mention that it seems like it might simply not be possible if you don't have a driver's license or passport)

Consider reporting this to your State and Federal trade commission and privacy enforcement entities. Moving forward it's likely useful to document the activity (screenshots and related, whatever is convenient) then followup to share the documentation with these groups.

How about building a service similar to unsubscribe.me which you give permission to log into each of these accounts every week or so and make sure all of these settings are always kept disabled? Would you pay $20/year for something like that?

Handing login details for all your accounts to a third party seems like that could have no serious repercussions to you?

same here - I had to disable them again.

The last time I checked this was ~2 years ago when it was brought up in another forum (reddit:/r/tmobile).

So I am curious how long my lines have been sending data to tmobile's data warehouse

If you don't pay, you're the product.

If you do pay, you're a product with disposable income.

Keep track of this, this is amazing data for a nice class action lawsuit.

Unfortunately, T-Mobile, like every other mobile phone provider, has a mandatory binding arbitration clause. It does come with an opt-out provision but requires that someone have opted out within 30 days of the first time they opened their account. If a subscriber did not opt-out back then, even if the terms and conditions subsequently change, the agreement is very specific that a new opt-out opportunity is not created.

I opted-out when I signed up a decade ago but I have no proof of having done that other than a website I barely remember visiting. They do not display my opt-out status anywhere and customer service claims they have no access to know whether or not I did.

This clause bit Patreon IIRC hard, when a mass of people made arbitration complaints in place of a class action. It turns into a financial DDoS pretty fast.

A similar thing happened to Uber.

It might not apply in cases like this where they are actively changing what you are setting up as your profile settings.

I.e., in their arbitration clause they clearly agreed to give users some control over some privacy settings. In changing your settings they are in breach of the clause not you.

Speak with your wallet and move to a different provider.

Americans should be made aware of how much cheaper it is in e.g. Europe. Companies are robbing us because most people think this is normal

defacto monopolies in the US is robbing basically everyone there.

The land owners have realized that the working people generating a savings is leaving money on the table.

‘Although the saying tells us “If it’s free, then you are the product,” that is also incorrect. We are the sources of surveillance capitalism’s crucial surplus: the objects of a technologically advanced “and increasingly inescapable raw-material-extraction operation. Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior.’

Excerpt From The Age of Surveillance Capitalism Shoshana Zuboff

Are you in the EU? It sounds illegal.

EDIT: Oh I didn't know T-Mobile was active in the US too.

I'm with Tele2 NL (which is just a sub-brand of T-Mobile NL) for my phone service, and I do believe the following settings were on before I turned them off:

- Receive advertisements from Tele2

- Receive advertisements from third parties

- Personal advice [based on my usage data]

- Relevant content [ads based on my personal data]

- Usage of location data [to send me ads]

- Usage of my data for market research purposes

This is what happens in capitalism.

> Nothing says a company can't make a reasonable business decision to leave money on the table.

I say if you make the decision to leave money on the table, you'll be fired and replaced with someone who won't. If you own the company, you'll eventually sell it to someone who got the loan to buy you 100% based on a promise to immediately pick up the money you've been leaving on the table.

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