When I heard Telstra, I thought - yeah that sounds about right. A truly disgusting monopolist.
For those outside of Australia, Telstra have a reputation somewhere between GoDaddy and Facebook. They came to power as a legal monopoly, originally government run, and own the majority of all copper lines in Australia. Telstra was then privatised in three different stages and proceeded to bully the industry.
For years the highest speed ADSL1 connection you could receive was 1.5 Mbit/s due to Telstra artificially limiting all companies who used their copper lines. Only in the last half decade have they extended this to the normal 8 Mbit/s[1].
The idea that the data sent over to the US was "completely anonymised" is laughable. Far more technically competent companies, like Netflix[2], have made mistakes in their anonymisation procedures in the past -- I fail to see how Telstra could avoid such a fate. If the data were ever released, it'd likely end up more like the AOL incident[3].
[1]: http://www.itwire.com/your-it-news/entertainment/7027-austra...
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize#Privacy_concerns
I'm not happy that the user data munging being outsourced but it is pretty likely that the same activity is rife at the other telcos (or will soon be, once their copy-happy product managers get wind of the feature).