If you're not aware, Verizon Wireless is not just a company that dabbles in selling mobile devices and offering services for those devices. The company also deals in selling relevant mobile advertising, and its latest plan for a quick buck is to monitor customer usage on mobile devices and sell that data to advertising marketers.
This, no doubt is quite a surprise coming from Verizon. The good news here is that the company alerted customers via email of its impending plan.
The data taken from your mobile devices and sold to marketers will be used to push relevant advertising to your screen. This means if you're a person who researches a lot on Chinese food, then relevant advertising pushed to your device should be about Chinese food.
"In addition to the customer information that's currently part of the program, we will soon use an anonymous, unique identifier we create when you register on our websites," Verizon Wireless said.
"This identifier may allow an advertiser to use information they have about your visits to websites from your desktop computer to deliver marketing messages to mobile devices on our network."
What Verizon is planning to do here, will only work if you're on the company's network. It works while using the company's mobile Internet plan and Wi-Fi Internet access plans.
Fortunately for users, there's a trick to keep away from this if need be, though many of Verizon Wireless customers might not realize there's a way out of it.
First thing's first, you should know that Verizon places a cookie on your computer once you've visited the company's website and log in. This cookie has an anonymous identifier that is available to third party marketers, who can use it to better target advertising on mobile and computer devices.
If a user should block cookies entirely, or this particular cookie, chances are, marketers won't get the chance to send you relevant advertising.
Another way to get out of this is to simply "option out." After logging into your Verizon account, scroll down to My Account>Manage Privacy Settings>Mobile Advertising, and then click on option out. That's it; all's well that ends well.
