That would be OK if my cellphone usage was "free". But it's not. I'm paying Verizon hundreds of dollars a month for me and my family.

I wonder if an MVNO would be less creepy than Verizon? Probably not, I'd bet they're even sleazier.

Well, do you care enough to take your business elsewhere? That's really the last-ditch way for you to have any voice on this.

For whatever it's worth, I left them recently for this very reason (your choice is yours, mine is mine, no preaching or judgement here either) – I ended up having a few minute conversation with the confused (but nice) call rep who didn't understand what they were doing but seemed to empathize as I explained it. Ultimately, will my explanation matter? Probably not, but it was all the power I felt I had, beyond cutting them off from my monthly payments.

While still not trustworthy in my book, t-mobile is definitely an upgrade, at least in this regard.

In the US, consider Credo Mobile or T-Mobile. Even AT&T discontinued this practice when called out on it, while Verizon's is flatly recalcitrant; their privacy policy says, "If you do not want information to be collected for marketing purposes from services such as the Verizon Wireless Mobile Internet services, you should not use those particular services."

Well, it seems that Verizon is the only one doing it. The article mentioned that AT&T ran a pilot program and decided not to do it.

So presumably any other US provider would be better than Verizon.

yeah, but people will justify it with a hard-on for verizon's network. where somehow in a large city, not a single other provider gets acceptable signal...

That was the first thing that came to mind when I read the name "Turn" - as in, "We Turn users into products."

What about a browser extension and a website that tracked Turn's advertising clients? The website and extension are there to help users boycott Turn's customers.

Can anyone think of a way to automate the collection of those ads and linked clients? Crowd-sourcing maybe?

Just because you don't value your privacy doesn't mean you get to project those values on the rest of us. Spying on your customers doesn't magically become moral simply because technology has made it easy. It most certainly is not necessary.

Really, the only reasons surveillance as a business model has worked is most people don't realize the extent that it is going on and by the time they do a monopoly or oligopoly has already established itself. Taking advantage of ignorance is at best rude and offensive, and at worst it should be criminal.

Unfortunately, the laws have yet to catch up to abuses like Verizon's MitM rewriting of HTTP headers. Worse, fixing laws and enforcing them against these modern abuses is going to be very hard: regulatory capture's a 'helluva drug.

"Keep your head out of the past?" What a rediculous rebuttal. Parent poster is well within his or her rights to feel that way. All the evidence we've been presented with in the past few years should lead everyone to the same conclusion. You are being tracked and your data sold to the highest bidder. How is that not cause for concern? Just because it occurred in the past?

The Internet is a necessity. That doesn't make actions like these less creepy.

Rejecting this kind of bad practices isn't the same as rejecting internet.