Verizon, one of the nation's best-known cellphone service providers, is now under fire for its tactics of monitoring consumers' habits when they're on their smartphones.
The company tends to collect data on customers' geographical locations, app use, mobile Web browsing habits and other details, and is now selling that information to third-party database companies, according to a report from
CNET. That data is then coupled with the customers' gender, age, and even information such as whether they like sports, regularly visit restaurants, or own pets.
The practice has privacy experts up in arms, the report said.
"I don't see any substantive difference between collecting content from one person and turning it over to someone, and collecting it from multiple people, aggregating that information and then turning the aggregated data over to someone else," Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the site.
Eduard Goodman, chief privacy officer for
IDentity Theft 911, has a blog about the ways in which consumers may have their privacy compromised in the course of their daily lives.
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