Privacy Policy for AT&T

http://www.att.com/gen/privacy-policy?pid=2506

Today we were asked in class to read through the new Privacy Policy for AT&T and give our thoughts about whether we were surprised, bothered, or happy by the policy.

Personally, I thought it was easy to navigate and broke down all their information in an easy-to-read manner. I felt the beginning gave a basic over view of their policy and from that point forward it provided a detailed question and answer format. Every question you can imagine from what information is collected to where the information goes is discussed.

AT&T's policy seems to be fair and sound. There were two things while reading that raised a couple questions in my head though. First, AT&T explains they have parental control tools so parents can monitor their children to the best of their ability. It claims that information is not collected on children 13-years-old and younger without parental consent. I thought that was strange because aren't you a child until you're 18-years-old? Parents should need to give consent for all children until they reach 18 years of age. We need to protect our children. This includes all their information. They are not old enough at 13 to know what kind of information about themselves is made "public knowledge" and so forth.

Second, as I was reading I came across the part where they were explaining which information about individuals is collected. One of the items listed was Internet Site Usage. This includes the pages you visit, the length of time you visited etc. I started to think about how I felt about this issue. Then, in class the question was posed. Do you feel okay that companies are essentially monitoring which sites you access etc.? Honestly, it doesn't bother me at all. It's an advertising and marketing tool. I understand that people don't want it to be monitored on the sites they are using, but here we are talking about phone sites basically. Who really cares? The monitoring of the sites allows advertisers to send you information you may be interested in and assesses the popularity of certain items over others and so forth. In a way it's kind of an interesting tool.