AT&T’s GigaPower plans turn privacy into a luxury that few would choose

If you sign up for AT&T’s GigaPower fiber-to-the-home Internet service in Austin (TX), you can expect to pay more than twice the advertised rate on plans that include video to keep your privacy and web surfing history intact.

AT&T’s GigaPower service, which currently delivers 300 Mbps to homes and will eventually get upgraded to a gigabit, launched last December in Austin. It did so with two different pricing plans, one that cost $99 a month for typical service, and another that cost $70 a month provided users agreed to let AT&T monitor their packets to see where on the web the user has been. In turn, AT&T would sell ads targeted to that customer based on his or her habits. But the $29 more a month to keep your privacy isn’t actually $29 a month.

As you add video service, the price differential between choosing privacy and letting AT&T snoop rose to $62 a month for an equivalent package and included a $49 one-time fee (see the screenshot below). Keeping your web history out of Ma Bell’s hands would have cost almost $800 the first year you signed up at the high-end and $531 at the low-end of ordering only Internet (there’s a $99 activation fee and a $7 monthly gateway box fee).