Your Internet and Cell Providers Are Watching!

Sounds creepy, right? It is.

I’ve written a lot about scams, data brokers and the many ways that criminals are trying to take advantage of us. In my first post of 2025, I talked about setting up a credit freeze to protect from identity theft. It’s a great way to ensure that someone who has our personal info cannot take out a loan or credit card in our name thus ruining our credit and leaving us liable for payments. It’s quick and easy and offers an important level of protection.

Who Knows the Most About Me

A Credit Freeze is a great first start, but thinking back to how someone might get our info in the first place, our first area of vulnerability is our cell provider and our internet provider. These folks probably know more about us than our spouse, our family, or our pets.

Think about it for a second. Every time we type a search request into google or duck duck go, or our favorite search engine, our internet provider knows. Every website we visit, they know. They know when we went and how long we stayed. If we’ve got location services enabled, they probably also know exactly where we were when we made that call, searched the web, or visited a website.

Who Cares?

In the past, this was always my response. Today, I watched the movie Freeway on amazon prime. As I watched, I visited imdb to see when the movie was made and who was in it. I visited my brokerage site and sold some covered calls. I read the news at allsides and a few other sites. Oh yeah, then I looked up some info on floating rate loans on investopedia.

I’m happy to share this with you and with T-Mobile. I’ve got nothing to hide.

I Care

Maybe not today’s activity, but here are a couple scenarios that scare me.

My insurance company gives me a discount if I download an app that tracks my driving behavior. It’s pretty sophisticated. It gives me an overall score and rates each trip on how often I brake hard, corner too fast, exceed the speed limit or engage in other bad behaviors.

I was amused at first, and pleased that my score was in the 90’s, and then I thought about how my phone, my insurance company, the app provider, and the cloud providers involved, all had access to my whereabouts each day 24×7. That’s creepy.

And while Mapfre is unlikely to be monitoring when I’m away from home, do they sell my info? Does the app provider? Cloud providers? What if any one of these services gets hacked?

Maybe I’m OK with Mapfre and T-Mobile knowing, but am I comfortable with anyone being able to get this info?

T-Mobile gathers data about me to “improve service”. It’s a little vague as to what their gathering, who they share it with and how it improves my service.

So, in summary, I guess I do care.

What Can I Do?

For today’s adventure, we are going to tiptoe through the privacy settings. T-Mobile is both my cell provider and home internet provider so this is a 1-step process. I suspect that Xfinity, Verizon, AT&T, and all the others have similar settings. And as customers, we are entitled to opt out of data sharing, and we are entitled to request a copy of the data that companies have on us. More on this in an upcoming post.

I start by logging in to my T-Mobile account. I click on the top, right where it says Brian and choose the profile option.

Hiding all the way at the bottom is Privacy and Notifications. Click it.

In the next window, choose Privacy Dashboard.

How many people do you think get this far? I may be the first.

Share Data for Public and Scientific Research

Absolutely not – toggle these off. The case for sharing seems a bit vague, and who determines public good?

Analytics and Reporting

Fabulous. Not mine – set it to off.

Advertising Options

Personalize my ads? Seriously? I don’t need ads from my phone or internet provider and I don’t need them tracking me so that others can target me with ads, or target me for any other nefarious reason. Off.

Product Development

I joined the T-Mobile home internet community to provide feedback. I’m not opposed to helping companies build better products, but I’m suspicious of this one. It sounds like they’ll be sharing info about the apps I use and the websites I visit.

Use my device and network info for new marketing experiences? No!

Profiling

Using my personal data for something you might do in the future – hard no.

Do Not Sell or Share

Click the button and more options appear

Do not sell or share my personal data. Why would I want you to? And why is the default “yes absolutely! Please share my personal data to anyone who has a credit card and asks for it.”

Wrap-Up

3 huge take-aways from this adventure

1. I am absolutely overwhelmed when I think about the data that my internet and cell providers have on me.
2. I cannot believe that the default set up is that this data is stored and shared with anyone they wish to share with or sell to.
3. It is almost criminal that the opt-out is hidden deep within the profile settings. Who would ever go here?

With a bit of hunting, I found a treasure trove of privacy settings that can help protect my data.

And I do care because my phone and my computer know an awful lot about me. The information itself is sensitive, but when we think about data aggregators and how they can put this information together with financial information to target us, it’s pretty scary.

It’s worth a few minutes to lock this down.

And while I was wrapping this up, I decided to update my mom’s account at Xfinity. I’m happy to report the privacy settings are even harder to find. I spent 10 minutes hunting and the went to duck duck go and searched for xfinity privacy.

I had already logged in so this link took me to the privacy page where I saw many of the same settings that T-Mobile has, and like T-Mobile, they were all set to “Yes Please, I’ll gladly share or allow you to sell my info!” They are now all toggled off.