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What bulls*&^. From my phone company.

How do we use information?
Information is collected whenever you use our products and services. From this information, we can do things like enhance the network, address problems and manage your services.
Here are details about two new programs, including privacy choices that you can make now and change any time you like.
Program One: “External Marketing & Analytics Reports”
We will make reports available to businesses to help them serve their customers better.

How is it my phone company’s job to help businesses by collecting information about me? And why aren’t I getting PAID to help my phone company help businesses collect marketing data?

These reports will contain anonymous information about our customers, such as how they use our products and services. The identity of individual customers is removed, and the information is used in a group, or aggregate, format.

Yeah. Right.

For example, we might provide reports to retailers about the number of wireless devices in or near their store locations by time of day and day of week, together with the device users’ collective information like ages and gender.

Collective. There you go.

This might allow a retailer in your neighborhood to learn more about local consumers as a group, but not about anyone individually, to improve its service.

Again. How it it my phone company’s job to do this? Let the freaking business look out the danged window if it wants to know the composition of the folk loitering around gazing at their iNavels.

You can choose to have your anonymous information excluded from these reports – things like wireless location information, U-verse® information, and website browsing or mobile application usage. Please visit ____ .
Program Two: Relevant Advertising including “Wireless Location Characteristics”
Relevant advertising from [my phone company] uses information from a variety of sources to help deliver online and mobile ads that you might find useful. We’re currently creating a new “wireless location characteristic” that will help us use local geography as a factor in delivering ads. This doesn’t mean you’ll get more ads. It means that the ads that you do get from [my phone company] may be more suited to your interests.
Location characteristics are types of locations – like “movie theaters.” People who live in a particular geographic area might appear to be very interested in movies, thanks to collective information that shows wireless devices from that area are often located in the vicinity of movie theaters. We might create a “movies” characteristic for that area, and deliver movie ads to the people who live there.

Gosh dangit. PEOPLE WHO LIVE AROUND MOVIE THEATERS ALREADY KNOW WHAT’S PLAYING.