www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/12/13/BU191399.DTL
Pacific Bell may be taking on a new name, but its still up to the same old tricks. The companys customers were outraged when I wrote how Pac Bell, which now wants to be known by the moniker of its corporate parent, SBC, slipped an insert into recent bills advising that personal information will be shared with business partners unless the customer says otherwise. Pac Bell is currently e-mailing high-speed Internet subscribers urging them to download new software to accommodate the companys marketing partner, Yahoo. The upgrade, Pac Bell promises, will provide incredible new features and services. What the company isnt saying is that Pac Bell DSL subscribers will be exposed to a whole new world of commercial exploitation as Yahoo mines their personal information and online habits to blitz them with ads and enroll them in unwanted marketing schemes. SBC wont say how many DSL customers Pac Bell has, but acknowledges that the majority of the parent companys 2 million subscribers nationwide are in California. According to Yahoos - not Pac Bells - privacy policy for DSL subscribers, the Sunnyvale Internet powerhouse will make use of information about you that is personally identifiable like your name, address, e-mail address or phone number, and that is not otherwise publicly available. For some services, Yahoo says it will request Pac Bell customers Social Security number and information about your assets. The online company says it will track DSL subscribers Internet browsing and share personal information with trusted partners. Such info will be used in part to customize the advertising and content you see. Once you create an SBC Yahoo account and sign in to our services, you are not anonymous to us, Yahoo warns in surprisingly stark language. Yet nowhere is any of this spelled out in the Pac Bell/SBC privacy policy that most Pac Bell customers would see - if theyre among the relatively tiny handful of people who wade through all that fine print. Pac Bell says only that Yahoo has its own privacy policy and may use your personal information in ways which are different than SBCs policy contemplates. Larry Meyer, an SBC spokesman, said that the language in Pac Bells privacy policy is clear enough and that customers arent being hoodwinked. That is, if Pac Bell DSL subscribers are willing to go to the trouble of reading not one but two separate privacy policies, especially the one for the company that they never intended to be a customer of in the first place. Nissa Anklesaria, a Yahoo spokeswoman, said she too believes Pac Bell customers are being given ample opportunity to understand that their personal information is going to be spread among even more marketers than before. Were very comfortable with the way weve presented the information to SBC DSL users, she said. But unless those users read both policies, they wont know that Yahoo monitors and records all visits to the thousands of Web pages constituting the Yahoo network, plus Yahoos online classified listings, Hotjobs. Also, while SBCs privacy policy says the company will use customers information to investigate complaints and protect SBC Yahoo and its members, Yahoos policy takes this sort of thinking a step further. It says: We believe it is necessary to share information in order to investigate, prevent or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person, violations of Yahoos terms of use or as otherwise required by law. This significantly more proactive policy will be unknown to Pac Bell customers unless they take it upon themselves to learn about how Yahoo operates. Theres nothing wrong with SBC and Yahoo having their own privacy policies. But when Pac Bell DSL subscribers are being pushed to switch to the new-and- improved SBC Yahoo service, youd think Pac Bell would be bending over backward to inform them about how things are changing. MUMS THE WORD: Speaking of keeping things quiet, perhaps you saw a federal judges decision the other day rejecting Congress efforts to find out whom Vice President Dick Cheney met with last year while formulating national energy policy. US District Court Judge John Bates, who was appointed to the bench by President Bush, ruled that the lawsuit brought by Congress General Accounting Office undercut the administrations ability to shape domestic policy. Bush and Cheney have both argued that details of Cheneys talks with energy industry leaders need to be kept secret so that the White House can receive unvarnished advice on important issues. My thinking is that if those documents supported the administrations contention that Enron and its cronies had no influence over official policy, theyd have been released long ago.
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