Wireless Carriers are Rolling out a Horrible New Way to Track You
Last week, privacy advocates turned up some unsettling news: for two years, Verizon’s Precision Insights division has been seeding web requests with unique identifiers. If you visited a website from a Verizon phone, there’s a good chance the carrier injected a special tag into the data sent from you phone, telling the website exactly who you were and where you were coming from, all without alerting customers or informing the public at large.
Networks like this have been used for surveillance before
Carriers have usually stayed out of the ad-tracking business, although many of the same divisions have offered pilot programs in tracking users’ locations. Instead, most of the tracking on the web happens through third-party firms like Google’s Doubleclick, which use easily identified cookies to follow users from site to site. But the carrier programs are inserting trackers at a higher level, in the process of routing data requests, which make the cookies both harder to identify and nearly impossible for a user to shake off.