From The LA Times:
David Lazarus:
Consumer Confidential
Your loss of privacy is a package deal
September 12 2007
The all-you-can-eat packages of voice, video and Internet services offered
by phone and cable companies may be convenient, but they represent a
potentially significant threat to people's privacy.
Take, for example, Time Warner Cable, which has about 2 million customers in
Southern California. The company offers a voice-video-Net package called
"All the Best" for $89.85 for the first 12 months.
But for anyone who has the wherewithal to read Time Warner's 3,000-word
California privacy policy, you discover that not only does the company have
the ability to know what you watch on TV and whom you call, but also that it
can track your online activities, including sites you visit and stuff you
buy.
Remember all the fuss when it was revealed last year that Google Inc. kept
voluminous records of people's Web searches, and that federal authorities
were demanding a peek under the hood? Multiply that privacy threat by three.
Internet, TV, phone -- it's hard to imagine a more revealing glimpse of your
private life.
"All your eggs are in one communications basket," said Beth Givens, director
of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego. "If a company wants to, it
can learn a great deal about you -- and it probably wants to."
More often than not, it'll also want to turn a fast buck by selling at least
a portion of that info to marketers.
All leading telecom companies are aggressively pushing these bundled service
plans after investing billions of dollars in high-speed digital networks.
For consumers, the upside is often a hefty savings compared with acquiring
the same services from multiple providers.
The downside is that you're making intimate details of virtually all your
network activities available to a single company -- and possibly government
officials.
[Use link below to continue reading]
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus12sep12,0,827991,full.column
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