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AT&T Would Like To Track Your Web Use For Advertising

by Dan Reilly on August 15, 2008 at 02:19 PM


In a move surely to be embraced by people who love being watched for advertising purposes, AT&T has informed Congress that it would like to monitor the browsing habits of its customers. Their justification for doing so is, in so many words, "Google does it, so why can't we?"

This all comes after a Congressional committee began investigating Web-tracking for advertising purposes after hearing that some Internet service providers would sell their customers' browsing histories to a company called NebuAd. The committee asked 33 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) about their tracking plans, and many companies (including AOL, Time Warner Cable, Comcast and Verizon) said they only monitor on sites they run. AT&T says their tracking would require customers to sign up for the service.

AT&T said that Google has "the ability to observe a user's entire Web browsing experience at a granular level" and only answered questions about deep packet inspection, not general tracking. Google responded in kind, basically saying, "we answered the questions, and AT&T's just trying to shift negative attention to us. Not cool." Depending on what the committee does from here, we could see a sweet tech company catfight with your Web surfing privacy at the core of the issue. [From: Silicon Alley Insider]

Tags: advertising, att, comcast, google, internet, privacy, twc, verizon, webtracking

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