rare pattern thoughts in a blog

[update: TechDirt has picked up the story.]

[update 2: Now the Washington Post and the normally quick-on-the-uptake Valleywag have picked up on it, too. Will this story get the attention of consumers? How much will Verizon Wireless customers appreciate this new "service"?]

Via Slashdot, we see that Verizon Wireless is planning on sharing their subscribers' private calling information.

What?

Two of us just received a notice from Verizon Wireless about CPNI. CPNI stands for Customer Proprietary Network Information: our call records, essentially. What numbers we called, how often, how long we spent on the phone, and how much it cost us. (It does not include our own names, numbers, or addresses.)

Verizon wants to share this data with third parties, and of course they need our permission: “you have a right, and we have a duty, under federal and state law, to protect the confidentiality of your CPNI.”

But that duty only goes so far: “Unless you provide us [Verizon Wireless] with notice that you wish to opt out within 30 days of receiving this letter, we will assume that you give the Verizon Companies the right to share your CPNI with the authorized companies as described above.”

I don't believe I've received this notice yet. I've been squeamish about using Verizon to start with, given their opposition to things ranging from Net Neutrality to municipal wi-fi initiatives, but their coverage area has beaten all others, in my experience so far.

Yet I'll be damned if I want to have myself and those people I have called, or who have called me, end up on some phone spam list.

The fact that they treat this as an "opt out" rather than an "opt in" is also telling of their own corporate values.

And maybe opting out of Verizon Wireless' spam plan won't do anything anyway:

"If you do not want us to collect, transmit or use such information about you for the above purposes, you should not use the services; by using the services, you expressly authorize us to use your information for these purposes."

My subscription ends on Halloween. Time to look to alternatives, I think. Too bad for us that they all pretty much stink.

Recently my longest-used website statistics service, StatCounter, posted a boast about how they turned away big advertisers who wanted to embed spyware cookies into the StatCounter tracking code. They also hinted that another big web stats company did not say no, and is planting spyware into their clients' websites on behalf of undisclosed advertisers.

You install StatCounter to track visitors to your site NOT to open yourself and your visitors up to being spied upon by phantom advertising corporations.

It appears, however, that other players in the world of webstats were happy to take up this offer…

We were shocked to discover just today that another well known stats provider is allowing up to 9 cookies to be installed in the browser of every visitor that hits one of their member websites. This means that the provider is making money by transmitting data on you and your visitors to a third party advertiser. Not only that, but to add insult to injury, the cookies are causing the member websites to load very slowly too.

Yikes.

Commenters weren't so coy. And neither were other bloggers.

Although SiteMeter has some really useful tools and information, I value your privacy and I will not tolerate this sort of behavior, therefore I’ve removed it completely from the site. I will now be switching to Google Analytics for stats and don’t expect any more problems of this nature. After all Google is known to be one of the most non-evil businesses there is and that is just perfect for The Best in Life.

troubled diva:

After five and a half happy years of stats-watching, I have just ditched SiteMeter from this site.

The reason? The SiteMeter Javascript has started serving calls to specificclick.net, which attempts to place site-tracking cookies (a.k.a. spyware) on your machine. Not only is this Bad and Wrong - it's also Dead Slow and A Bit Crap Really. Especially if you're still using Internet Explorer, which has been noticeably slow in loading this site for quite a while now.

Suburban Hen:

So, if you aren't sure if your provider has your best interests at heart and that bothers you, switch. I realise this isn't appealing to those who are a bit attached to that number at the bottom (side, top, centre...WHATEVER) of their web page, but quite frankly, surreptitious loading of cookies onto peoples computers to drag more money out of our arses is not that appealing either.

Just sayin'.

As it turns out, the specificclick cookie set by SiteMeter "tracks browsing activity." Seems innocuous enough, until you consider that it's tracking all browsing activity, not just clicks on that site where the cookie is set. Meaning they know where you bank, what discussion forums you visit, what, ahem, other websites you might be viewing on the sly.

In a comment on The Best Things in Life: Free, west writes of an email he received from SiteMeter, which proclaimed:

Over the next few months we will be rolling out enhancements to our service that will offer you more information about your users like their other content interests and demographics (a la Quantcast).

I don't know about you, but to me that sounds like, well, spying.

I ran a test: Cleared all my cookies on Opera, which I hardly ever use, and visited my business website. Sure enough, StatCounter is clean: one single cookie, which they use to track visitor behavior on your own site.

Google Analytics, however, is especially sneaky: It sets four cookies and pretends they are set by the site itself. One of these cookies doesn't expire until 2036! Another expires in ... 1969.

I have no idea what Google is doing with these cookies. It seems rather sneaky to mask them as belonging to the site owner, though I suppose that arguably can make their stats more meaningful, as presumably quite a few people set their browsers to block the setting of all cookies except for those originating from the visited site itself.

As for SiteMeter, I can't say I cared for their service in the first place. I had tried them years ago, but never stuck. Needless to say, I won't be going back any time soon. Where things stand with SiteMeter's spyware policy now, I'm not sure. Shane offers this update:

Two and a half weeks after StatCounter broke the story and it began to spread across the web, SiteMeter has begun to respond to the issue both in the comments of my post and at much greater length in the comments on Eric Odem’s.

Despite that, though, I can still not find not find the official response they say is on their own blog, nor have they directly addressed many of the specific issues that people have reported. I hate that because I have a feeling they really haven’t done anything wrong, but their damage control isn’t helping them at all.

Michael Sync has a helpful public service kind of post for those not all that familiar with cookies or how to deal with them.

Meanwhile, I'm glad I've been using StatCounter.

Actually, I'm surprised this is only starting now.

Get ready for the inbox on your phone to fill up faster. From fast-food chains to carmakers to consumer goods manufacturers and sports franchises, more and more companies are adopting text messaging as a way to target consumers on the move.

That's right. Once again, international corporations are looking for new ways to invade your space and push their sales pitches into your face.

No web 2.0 for these folks. No viral marketing, no sirree.

Consultant Frederick Newell says companies using text messaging should move carefully because of privacy concerns and must get customers' permission first.

Like they got your permission to show 15 minutes of advertisments for consumer products and tv shows at the beginning of theatrical films.

SmartReply, the Irvine, Calif.-based marketing firm involved in the Meijer campaign, said consumers need not fear a bombardment of unwanted messages from the burgeoning industry.

"Mobile marketing has the power of e-mail but we've learned from the mistakes of e-mail in that the mobile channel is regulated from the beginning in terms of spam," said Mike Romano, the company's executive vice president of business development.

Call me a cynic, but I'll believe it when I don't see it.