What Your Wireless Carrier Knows About You
Like a lot of cell phone users, you may be wondering just what your wireless company knows about you. Can it see what kinds of apps you’re running on your phone and where you go online while you’re out and about? Can it tell what types of phones and tablets are connected to their networks, and how much data they consume? The answer to these questions is “yes.”
As mobile data usage has skyrocketed, wireless operators have built even more intelligence into their networks to help them can allocate network resources properly. For instance, if you download or upload moderate-size files from the Internet, your provider might label your task “low priority” and allocate more available bandwidth to the person across the street who is running a highly time-sensative app like video chat.
In general terms, wireless operators capture three main kinds of information: information about the devices connected to the network, metadata about the packets of data that run through the network, and information about the content contained in the packets being downloaded or uploaded by the subscriber. For the most part, the carrier sees this information in an aggregated form that is not directly associated with individual users. Operators spend most of their time looking at large trends in the usage patterns of large groups of users.
