T-Mobile Tracking Changes

by Colin Berkshire

If you are a T-Mobile customer, you need to act fast. They are changing their privacy policy … to be more like the others.

Starting April 26th, T-Mobile will begin monitoring which websites you visit, and can view and analyze your email and other data. They can then begin “monetizing” your web activity such as by selling “relevance” to advertisers. Let me be clear: T-Mobile has access to all of your unencrypted data and can use that in any way they choose. They can see it to marketers “to increase marketing relevance”. They can sell it to the US government. Your data is now their data.

Even if you have opted out of all previous T-Mobile advertising, marketing, promotional, and privacy options, you MUST go back in and opt out of these new options. To circumvent your previous requests, T-mobile added two new categories:

  1. Use my data for analytics and reporting.
  2. Use my data to make ads more relevant to me.

Turning off these two options is confusing, because if you choose the “Change Your Settings” option in the notification email and then DO NOT choose the option “Choose your marketing preferences” or you will be sent to the wrong page that doesn’t even show the new options. You need to scroll down to the portion that is off your screen (what is called “below the fold”) and choose “More of what you like, less of what you don’t.” And, resist clicking on “Find out more” or you will get lost in an endless amount of links and cross-links that will hide where to go.

Their description reads like this: (Annotated)

T‑Mobile…may share…usage and device data, demographic data, and location data…to serve ads…and to measure the effectiveness. We [and companies we sell your data to] may place cookies and web beacons, or use mobile device identifiers and similar technologies on websites and apps [that may be in no way related to T-Mobile].
This link should get you where you need to be to protect your privacy:
https://www.t-mobile.com/account/profile/line-selector/advertising