Data privacy: Here’s how to limit what your carrier collects

If you’re a Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile customer, you might be surprised by how much information you agree to share with your provider the moment you sign up. Some of this is expected, such as your Social Security number, home address, and payment details. Beyond that, carriers also enable settings that allow them to collect data from your web browsing, location, and more. While they do not directly access this information themselves, it is used to build advertising profiles and personalize your experience.

It is also not just for internal use. The big three carriers share, and in some cases sell, personal information to other companies for targeted ads or credit checks. When you consider the steady stream of high-profile security breaches carriers have faced in recent years, it is understandable if the idea of handing over even more data makes you uneasy.

The good news is that you do have some control. By law, carriers must provide opt-outs for certain types of data sharing, such as T-Mobile’s recently introduced “sharing certain financial information” toggle. Every major US carrier offers at least some form of opt-out program, though the options vary.

The catch is that carriers are not required to proactively tell you about these settings. Even worse, some of these settings are turned on by default, though thankfully not all of them. Nonetheless, if you care about your data privacy, it is worth checking your provider’s privacy and security menus regularly to see what is new and what you can disable. With that in mind, let’s walk through each carrier’s settings and explain what they mean and how to turn them off if you prefer.

To access T-Mobile’s Privacy Center, you’ll want to log in to your T-Mobile account via the website or the T Life app. From there, you’ll go to My Account in the upper right corner, followed by Profile.

Once you get there, you’ll see a number of different toggles covering the following:

• Share data for public and scientific research: Shares anonymized location, demographic, and usage data with researchers for public studies (not law enforcement). This setting rolled out during the pandemic. It’s fairly benign, but some users may still prefer not to share this data.
• Analytics and reporting: Collects app usage, location, age range, and gender to create aggregated marketing reports shared with other companies.
• Sharing certain financial information: Allows T-Mobile to share data with financial companies for joint marketing, affiliate purposes, and general creditworthiness.
• Fraud and identity theft protection: Allows T-Mobile to use your data to “create indicators of potential fraud,” such as notifying your bank if your contact information changes unexpectedly.
• Advertising options: Collects app usage and download data for personalized ads, combined with demographic and location data. Turning this off won’t remove ads—just personalization.
• Product development: Allows T-Mobile to use your data, including precise location, apps, websites, and phone numbers, to help advertisers improve ad targeting.
• Profiling and automated decisions: One of the more concerning options. T-Mobile states it collects personal data to “evaluate, analyze, or predict certain personal aspects about your performance at work, economic situation, health, personal preferences, interests, reliability, behavior, location, or movements.”
• Do not sell or share my personal information: Controls whether T-Mobile can share or sell your data with other companies outside of the categories above. Even if disabled, some information may still be shared when necessary to deliver T-Mobile services.

As you can see, there’s a lot of overlap between these options. How much information you’re comfortable sharing is up to you, but I recommend disabling profiling at a minimum, given how vague and broad it is. Personally, I’d disable everything except Fraud and Identity Theft Protection, but it’s ultimately your call.

You can access Verizon’s privacy settings by going to Account and then Account Overview from the website or app. After that, you’ll want to select profile and settings and then choose manage privacy settings. From there, you’ll find a number of settings:

• Customer Proprietary Network Information: This setting dictates whether or not Verizon can use information it has about you to sell you other services beyond what you are paying for.
• Business and Marketing Insights: This setting gathers aggregated information about web browsing, app use, location, and demographic data and combines that with information Verizon gets from other parties to help Big Red come up with “insights” around usage.
• Custom Experience: If this setting is enabled, Verizon can gather information about “websites you visit and apps you use” to help better understand what you’re into, such as gaming and other activities.
• Custom Experience Plus: This setting combines the CPNI information and Custom Experience sections so Verizon can fully personalize its marketing and recommendations.

Be aware that enabling or disabling some of the settings will directly impact others. In other words, look through the list carefully after you make any changes.

To access privacy options, you’ll want to log in to your AT&T account online or via the app and go to Profile > Privacy Choices. You’ll be given the following options:

• Personalized: This setting “allows the use of your data for automated decision making.” This includes using AI to generate marketing or customized ads.
• Personalized Plus: This setting uses data, including “web browsing and precise location for customization,” such as offers and ads. The carrier makes it clear that this does not give them access to the contents of your texts, emails, or calls.
• Identity Verification: This lets AT&T work with third parties to perform identity verification and help with fraud prevention. This includes verifying information with a bank, for example.
• Share or sell my personal information: Lastly, this option lets AT&T share or sell limited personal information that can be used to deliver, measure, and create targeted ads.
• Automated Messages: This lets you allow the carrier to contact you by phone or text with important non-marketing info like repair appointments and changes to billing and account information.

While you can easily turn off all the above settings, the Identity Verification setting is certainly pretty benign and might be worth keeping enabled.

What if you have a prepaid carrier instead of one of the big three postpaid options? Just like the big guys, many of these carriers can and will share limited information as well. Although the exact steps will vary depending on the provider, you can generally find privacy information through your provider’s account settings. If you can’t dig up the specifics for your carrier, you can always give customer service a call, and they should be able to point you in the right direction.