Photo: John MacDougall (Getty Images)
Heads up, fellow T-Mobile customers: You might want to take a look at your mobile carrier’s privacy policy.
Advertisement
As first spotted by the Wall Street Journal, the company’s latest update to its privacy policy is set to automatically enroll paying phone subscribers into an ad-targeting program that will see their data shared with unnumbered advertisers starting next month. It’s also worth noting here that the privacy policy update also carries over for any Sprint customers who were gobbled by T-Mobile during the two company’s mega-merger last year.
T-Mobile’s latest Privacy Notice lays out some of the specifics: Starting April 26, the company writes, it will begin a “new program” that shares some personal data—like the apps you download or the sites you visit—with third-party advertisers. T-Mobile also adds that it won’t share your precise location data “unless you give [T-Mobile] your express permission,” and won’t share information in a way that can be directly tied back to your device. But like we’ve written before, just because a dataset is “anonymized” doesn’t mean that you can take the company anonymizing it (T-Mobile, in this case) at its word.