AT&T GigaPower Internet Service Trades User Privacy for Low Cost

$29 per month. That's how much it costs for users to protect their privacy online—according to AT&T, at least, which is charging the additional fee for customers who opt out of being tracked while using its GigaPower ultra-fast Internet service.

AT&T is offering GigaPower in certain U.S. cities to compete with Google Fiber. It delivers bandwidth speeds of about a gigabit, which is magnitudes faster than what most Americans get in their homes today.

Services like GigaPower, which costs only $70 per month, hold appeal a time when Americans are paying more for slower Internet service than their counterparts in other countries. GigaPower is priced similarly to standard Internet plans. (Actually, it's only $25 more per month than AT&T's highest-bandwith DSL plan, which is also 99.4 percent slower than GigaPower.)

But there's a catch: GigaPower not only delivers ultra-fast Internet, but also monitors "the webpages you visit, the time you spend on each, the links or ads you see and follow, and the search terms you enter," according to AT&T, which says it uses the information to direct ads at users.

The company adds that the monitoring "works independently of your browser's privacy settings regarding cookies, do-not-track and private browsing." That's a polite way of saying GigaPower totally disregards users' requests not to be tracked or to have the ISP read private data.

Not all hope is lost. Users who want more privacy can opt out of the tracking program, which is called Internet Preferences. But they have to pay an additional $29 per month to opt out, which makes GigaPower a less attractive deal.

But the extra money is not the real issue. What really matters is that services like GigaPower set an unsettling precedent for Internet connectivity in the United States. They force users to choose between privacy and cost-efficient, high-bandwidth Internet. At a time when high-speed connections to the Internet are vital for all sorts of reasons, this is not an easy choice to make.

Programs like GigaPower are also interesting because they signal a new front in the battle for online privacy. Much ink has been spilled—or, er, pixels fired—in recent months about whether it's "wrong" to use software like ad blockers to protect one's privacy on the Internet. That discussion seems to reflect rising awareness of user privacy risks online among the public at large—as opposed to geeks and experts, who previously were the only groups who really understood how online tracking worked.

By bundling anti-privacy practices with high-speed Internet, AT&T GigaPower is complicating the picture even more for consumers. The latter are likely to believe that simple tools like ad blockers will keep them safe online, which is not true when an ISP is tracking user data and behavior at the connection level.

Is there a way to let users have gigabit Internet and privacy at the same time? For now, not really (although Google Fiber, for the record, claims not to track users). But more education about how online tracking works certainly will not hurt.