Verizon Wireless Under Fire for Ad-Targeting Program

Verizon Wireless has recently come under fire from privacy advocates for tracking the activities of subscribers on its cellular network.

Verizon quietly started its ad-targeting program two years ago and this year teamed up with other data management and advertising companies. Jacob Hoffman-Andrews of the Electronic Frontier Foundation noticed the program and sounded the alarm. The program involves injecting a header containing a unique, anonymous identifier into a Verizon Wireless user’s request for a web page. “[W]hile we’re concerned about Verizon’s own use of the header, we’re even more worried about what it allows others to find out about Verizon users,” Hoffman-Andrews said. Verizon’s ad-targeting method groups these identifiers into different buckets of demographics and interests, so if a website is looking to serve certain ads to a specific type of customer, it will look for those buckets and serve up those ads.

Here’s the kicker: Even though Verizon allows users to opt out of the program by calling a phone number or changing their privacy settings, Verizon keeps tacking an identifier onto the customer’s web browsing for “other authentication purposes,” such as logging in to Verizon’s apps, according to the company.