Just what are we opting-in to?

Every week, I engage in the same evening ritual. After sorting through my mail, I find an envelope from AT&T, which I open assuming it's a bill or perhaps a letter complimenting me on the fine journalism I do here at Telephony. But with one exception each month, it is always junk mail: a check enticing me to sign up for home phone service or a pamphlet extolling the virtues of DSL.

I've talked to half a dozen AT&T customer service reps about this, all of whom were very sympathetic and promised to put me on a “do not market” list. Being on the list has produced some results: I no longer get AT&T marketing e-mails, and for a while the text message promotions stopped — though just today I received a text alert telling me I can now make international calls. While AT&T customer service insisted that list would shield me from all promotions, it's hardly the case.

I know it sounds like I'm just bashing AT&T here. I assure you I'm not. AT&T just happened to be my operator of record when I chose to write this. I know what the situation is: The back-office systems of AT&T's divisions don't communicate. The marketing monster is the mythical opt-out hydra. You lop off one head and two more promos spring up in its place. But AT&T isn't the only one; Sprint did the same before them, as did Comcast when I was a cable subscriber.

So if I'm resigned to my fate, why am I wasting paper and your time complaining? It occurs to me that wireless operators soon will ask us to take a leap of faith. As mobile advertising takes off and operators start mining their wealth of demographic and contextual information to target ads, they're going to need our permission. Sure there's a trade-off for us: Many of the services we once paid for we'll receive for free. But the operators will be asking for a lot of power. They'll want permission to use data on where we are, what we're doing and even what general mood we're in for marketing use. They'll ask us to trust them not to abuse that power.

We live in a time when Yahoo! forks over the identities of dissidents to Chinese authorities — when telecom operators issue wiretaps and hand over call records to the feds without a subpoena. We live in a time when we're barraged with junk mail and e-mail from operators — who don't cease when we ask them to stop. When they start asking to pry further into our lives with the promise they won't misuse that information, will we be ready to say yes?