When AT&T first launched their 1 Gbps (which is still actually 300 Mbps, but whatever) "Gigapower" service in Austin late last year in response to Google Fiber, the company's pricing raised a few eyebrows. In addition to the $350 ETF, installation and activation fees (which Google doesn't charge), AT&T only matched Google's $70 pricing point if you agreed to opt in to the company's Internet Preferences, which goes beyond Google-esque snooping to use deep packet inspection to track each and every website you visit, and for how long.
If you aren't willing to be tracked, users have to pay $100 a month; in other words a $30 privacy protection tax.
Interestingly, Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM has discovered that the $30 privacy tax is actually significantly higher if you add TV services:
quote:
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).
So not only is the fee to not be snooped on an absurd $62 a month, you'll also get socked with a $50 activation fee if you try to opt out of the program. This really is competition in only the way AT&T could envision it. It's particularly odd in that AT&T could have just quietly opted everybody in to Internet Preferences by default at the $70 price point, and few probably would have even noticed (or cared). By breaking it out as an added "discount," AT&T only really draws attention to their snoopvertising.On the bright side, since AT&T's supposed expansion of Gigapower to 100 additional cities is largely
criticism-deflecting PR bluff, AT&T's all-too-clever Gigapower privacy tax probably won't be visiting your neck of the woods anytime soon.