AT&T has updated its privacy policy, stating that the company may sell aggregate and anonymous user usage information to advertisers. In a blog post, Bob Quinn, AT&T’s senior vice president-federal regulatory and chief privacy officer, noted that many companies are increasingly using customer data to help personalize and improve the products and services they offer consumers.
“We don’t sell your personal information, and we won’t use it (other than to provide and improve your services as discussed above) unless you tell us you want us to do that,” Quinn wrote. To justify the potential sale of consumer usage data to third parties, such as location and Web browsing history among other information, Quinn said that in the Internet world, aggregate and anonymous data can be used by retailers, advertisers and marketing companies to figure out what consumers want in a particular area.
In the post, Quinn notes that Verizon uses anonymous and aggregate customer data to create marketing reports that help other companies better serve their customers.
The new updated privacy policy was posted by the telco on its webpage on June 28. It outlines a couple of new programs it plans to offer and asks users to send comments and suggestions during a 30-day feedback period.
Big data adoption: IBM and the University of Oxford cooperated on a survey of 1,061 companies around the world which showed that 28% of the surveyed companies from multiple industries were piloting or implementing big data projects. The survey divided corporate big data adoption into four phases: educate, explore, engage and execute.
IDC recently conducted an in-depth research study on big data adoption in Australia . According to the study, about a third of Australian organizations surveyed cite big data analytics as essential or critical to their organizations. The study also revealed that more than 80% of the surveyed organizations had either already deployed big data analytics or plan to do so in the next 12 months.
More news from the telecom analytics market:
- Polystar, a supplier of service assurance, network monitoring and test solutions for the telecom market, announced that it has expanded its customer insight solution and introduced “Marketing Analytics” for telco marketers. The new product is designed to deliver comprehensive, real-time subscriber awareness and enhanced business intelligence of over-the-top (OTT) application usage.
- Terracotta, provider of in-memory technologies for enterprise big data, unveiled new versions of BigMemory 4, focused on managing big, fast data. It also released Web Sessions 4, a solution for distributed in-memory session management.
- Logi Analytics announced its integration with Amazon Redshift, a cloud-based analytical data warehouse service designed to deliver high performance analytics for data warehouse and big data applications.
- Vodafone India will deploy Cisco’s Next-Generation IP networking solutions. The announcement was made July 8.
The telecom analytics series provides weekly insights on trends, new products and other topics that touch on the advantages and monetization opportunities of analytics tools for telecom operators, including big data, business intelligence, customer experience analysis and management, business analytics and network analytics. Also, be sure to check out video interviews about telecom analytics on RCRTV.