1) "AT&T rewrites rules: Your data isn't yours"
From today's San Francisco Chronicle via havecoffeewillwrite :
AT&T has issued an updated privacy policy that takes effect Friday. The changes are significant because they appear to give the telecom giant more latitude when it comes to sharing customers' personal data with government officials.2) WSJ: Verizon is trying to sell off its Ohio customers.
The new policy says that AT&T -- not customers -- owns customers' confidential info and can use it "to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process."
The policy also indicates that AT&T will track the viewing habits of customers of its new video service -- something that cable and satellite providers are prohibited from doing.
This doesn't show up in a Google News search, but a friend in the Communications Workers sent me a copy of a May 10 Wall St. Journal article by Dionne Searcey and Dennis Berman that says, in part:
Verizon Communications Inc. is fielding offers for two big packages of traditional telephone lines that could have a combined value of up to $8 billion, say people familiar with the matter. The possible sales are part of the New York-based phone giant's strategy to delve deeper into the wireless and broadband arenas, while getting out of the traditional phone business in U.S. areas that aren't slated for fiber upgrades -- which allow the company to sell more Internet-based services -- and therefore are less valuable to the company in the long run... Verizon also has been shopping a package dubbed "GTE North" that comprises about 3.4 million access lines in former GTE Corp. territories in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio and Michigan. [emphasis added]Here's a PUCO map of Verizon's "GTE North" service territory in Ohio. Notice it includes a significant chunk of northeast Ohio (southern Lorain and Medina Counties). Over 800,000 households in this territory were served by GTE when it merged with Bell Atlantic in 2000 to form Verizon.
If the WSJ is correct, all these customers are up for sale as "less valuable" because they're "not slated for fiber upgrades", i.e. Verizon has no intention of offering them its new fiber-optic IPTV and Internet service ("FiOS").
Do you think Verizon explained all this to Sherrod Brown (who represents those Lorain/Medina households), Ted Strickland (whose district includes much of the Verizon/GTE North service area along the Ohio River), or any other Ohio Congressman who supported* the company's national video franchising bill on the grounds that it would (in Strickland's words) "facilitate competition in the video market so that consumers have more choices and can benefit from lower cable prices"? The promised "competition" being the FiOS IPTV that Verizon apparently isn't planning to offer in their districts.
Or did the Verizon lobbyists just forget to mention it, counting on the Congressmen to miss the Journal story, not understand its implications, or choose to ignore it?
And how about Voinovich and Dewine? What do they know about Verizon's plan to bail out of Ohio?
Lots of questions. Stay tuned.
*Brown supported the bill in committee but voted against its final passage.