For $70 a month, you can enjoy AT&T Inc. ’s ultrafast fiber-optic Internet access. For an additional $29 a month, you can avoid being tracked doing it.
AT&T T, -0.63% introduced its one gigabit-per-second service in Austin, Texas, in 2013, and rolled it out Tuesday in Kansas City, Mo. But the service comes with a hitch: The company tracks users as they surf the Web. Customers who want to keep their browsing habits to themselves have to pay a fee to opt out of monitoring.
Jonathan Mayer, a Stanford University computer scientist who focuses on online monitoring technology, said the user tracking by companies that provide both wireless and wired Internet access is worrisome. Such companies are in a position to perform relatively comprehensive tracking, and customers don’t have any practical way to thwart it, he said.
Many Web companies let users opt out of sharing certain information at no charge, and Mr. Mayer questioned whether AT&T’s privacy option is designed to discourage people from opting out of tracking. The monthly charge “seems like a huge penalty intended to normalize the practice,” he said.