131b revenue in 2015. So, at 1.3m, a 0.001% fine, aka <i>half a minute of revenue.</i><p>Interestingly it doesn't <i>directly</i> fix the problem either (although it wrecks the current free-profit model, yay!), <i>"To settle this matter, Verizon Wireless will pay a fine of $1,350,000 and implement a compliance plan that requires it to obtain customer opt-in consent prior to sharing a customer’s UIDH with a third party to deliver targeted advertising"</i><p>But lest anyone think this is a UIDH prohibition, the next line goes on to say customers must at least have the ability to opt-out from <i>internal</i> Verizon usage, meaning the UIDH will be there (unless the customer opts out) and that a persistent, unique identifier that follows the user wherever they go is permitted. This ruling is primarily about Verizon <i>sharing</i> the targeting information: Verizon is still permitted a persistent attack on their users, but they are now only permitted to sell customer data on an opt-in basis. Ad-networks will have to do their own tracking themselves for everyone else.<p>Hopefully Verizon's profits from this schtick are shorn from this shift, to a degree where they give up this <i>disgraceful corpoate panopticon</i> they've been going to the bank on.
VerizonWireless does all sorts of <i>ahem</i> questionable things to the
network traffic passing through it, particularly unencrypted traffic
like plain HTTP. If you're concerned about image quality, one of their
more insidious but unnoticed intrusions is their on-the-fly
recompression and/or resizing of images.<p>Always using a VPN (or SSH tunnel) solves most of the problems.<p><pre><code> $ ssh me@example.com -4ND 127.0.0.1:1080
</code></pre>
But you'll need to make sure ppp(8) ignores the HLDC errors they inject
into long standing sessions. It will work if your settings and chat
script are correct.<p>Lastly, check your contract; you might be one of the lucky ones who have
the clause stating VPN traffic is not counted towards your bandwidth cap
and/or rate limit.
This is a big victory:<p>> 16. Termination of Investigation. In express reliance on the covenants and representations in this Consent Decree and to avoid further expenditure of public resources, the Bureau agrees to terminate the Investigation. In consideration for the termination of the Investigation, Verizon Wireless agrees to the terms, conditions, and procedures contained herein.<p>Verizon has agreed to pay $1.35M and will likely notify the FTC by mail if it makes a change. It has agreed to abide by the law. If you put this in perspective, this is way more than a slap on the wrist. If we assume a gb costs ~$10 and an average user uses ~6gb then:<p>($1,350,000 fine / $10/gb) / (6gb/user * 12months) = 1875<p>This is almost very nearly 1900 people! A huge number. Obviously this is back of a napkin, and the actual size of headers is pretty negligible so there isn't any sense in backing that out of the calculation, because the users already paid for the bandwith.<p>Plus, verizon is <i>literally</i> the only company out of hundreds of providers doing this. Surely between the weight of this fine and the competition the company will go bankrupt soon.<p>Big win! Say what you want about the FTC but they closed down the investigation saving an untold number to the US tax payer, Verizon is forced to break the bank, and the response time was rapid, 4 years open shut.<p>The FTC has been super sharp on policing the industry, by allowing the Governement to subsidize huge swathes of infrastructure costs and selling a finite amount of bandwith, they have been able to keep companies on their toes, not allowing any one company to own telephone, wireless, and internet capabilities.<p>I hope they can keep this up because Verizon is the only bad actor in the entire space, so it is pretty much all taken care of now.
It took about 10 days for the opt out to work for me.<p>"Overall, Verizon reported a profit of $4.22 billion" reported by forbes for the 2015 operating year.
That is profit, not revenue.<p>So, 1,300,000 / 4,220,000,000 = .000308
ouch..
Verizon was fined for <i>not disclosing</i> supercookie injection. They can still do it, but have to allow for opt-out.<p>Amusingly, they don't do it for "government or enterprise" accounts.
Here is a discussion from a year or two ago that explains the header: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8500131" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8500131</a>
The punishment should fit the crime. If penalties were tied to some sort of assessment of economic gains from the violations, it might start to make companies weigh their actions a bit more...
A lot of threads here are focused on the miniscule fine, but the larger impact is that this is another case study that can be used in the next net neutrality debate. Verizon is giving evidence to the argument that they can't be trusted with network communications, evidence that will surely come back to bite them in the future.
0.001%.<p>Is there any reason why Verizon would even bother to comply??<p>Just wait and see what happens if you get another suit that penalize you 0.01%, then comply.<p>I'm being sarcastic of course.
Despite all the outrage against Verizon, a small part of me feels sorry for them. Having consulted with large corporations in the past, I know that most (all) of them don't generally have expertise in this kind of thing, and usually outsource it to a variety of digital agencies. My guess is that they will be having a very hard conversation with one or more of their vendors.