It took a while, but Verizon appears to finally have gotten the message that consumers don’t like companies fiddling with their traffic and ignoring all of their privacy preferences (weird, right?). The wireless carrier has taken heat for several months now for its practicing of embedding all wireless user traffic with a unique identifier traffic header (or UIDH). That header was intended to help Verizon track user online behavior via its own programs, but because it’s transmitted for everyone to see, the potential for abuse was high and — despite Verizon’s claims to the contrary — it pretty quickly wound up being abused.

One of the biggest problems with the program (aside from modifying user traffic to begin with) was that if a user opted out of Verizon’s program, they were only able to opt out of personalized ad delivery — not the embedding of the UIDH. After months of staying largely mute on the subject, Verizon has issued a statement saying that its opt-out service will actually work — sometime “soon”:
“Verizon takes customer privacy seriously and it is a central consideration as we develop new products and services. As the mobile advertising ecosystem evolves, and our advertising business grows, delivering solutions with best-in-class privacy protections remains our focus. We listen to our customers and provide them the ability to opt out of our advertising programs. We have begun working to expand the opt-out to include the identifier referred to as the UIDH, and expect that to be available soon. As a reminder, Verizon never shares customer information with third parties as part of our advertising programs.”

Read the Full Article: Source – Tech Dirt
https://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20150130/09022329861/verizon-finally-buckles-will-allow-total-opt-out-sneaky-super-cookies.shtml

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