Like most companies, T-Mobile wants your money but it also wants your data. Back in May, we learned T-Mobile’s T-Life app was recording customers’ phone screens by default—at least, anything they did within that app. You could opt-out, but you’d only do that if you knew it the app was doing it, and if you knew there was a setting to stop it, which is pretty shady.
That feature could be disabled via T-Life’s Privacy Center, where the company keeps all of its settings related to user privacy. (T-Mobile says it collects your data to “improve” your experience and personalize the ads you see.) If you’re a customer, it’s good practice to spend some time here and opt-out of any data collection practices you aren’t interested in. (Which, for most of us, will be all of them.)
But if you’ve previously gone through the Privacy Center and made sure all settings are to your liking, it’s time to do it again: As reported by The Mobile Report, T-Mobile has two new toggles in the Privacy Center that are enabled by default. Without intervention, these two settings will allow T-Mobile to collect more of your data—in one case, pretty egregiously so.
Here’s what each new setting does, and how you can turn them off.
Fraud and identity theft protection
First up is a new feature that supposedly “helps protect you against fraud and identity theft.” According to T-Mobile, the “Fraud and identity theft protection” setting uses your data to make “indicators” of potential fraud. T-Mobile keeps these indicators themselves, but also shares them with third-parties, such as companies you have accounts with, to look for any instances where someone may be using your information fraudulently. T-Mobile says it uses data like account information and activity, device information, texting and calling patterns, and interactions with “potentially” malicious URLs in order to power this feature.
It’s a noble goal, sure, and a bit of a refreshing one at that. It’s nice to see a privacy feature from a major company that explicitly aims to prevent identity fraud, even when it occurs outside T-Mobile channels. But is the juice worth the squeeze? That might be up to each individual user. I don’t have T-Mobile, but if I were going all-in on user privacy, I’d probably opt out of this feature. That’s simply too much information to offer up with no guarantee it’ll actually prevent fraud. (I mean, texting and calling patterns? Yeesh.)
In addition, we don’t really know which third-parties T-Mobile is sharing this data with. Maybe it’s with another company that already has that data on you, say your bank. Or, maybe it’s a totally unrelated company altogether, and now they have your device information and how long your phone calls usually last. No thanks.
Sharing certain financial information
If T-Mobile uses your data to manage “financial offerings,” which includes things like financing a device or postpaid services, it may share that data with a wide variety of third-parties, including:
What do you think so far?
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Financial companies for joint marketing
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Affiliates for “everyday business purposes,” specifically if the data related to your credit
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Affiliates for marketing purposes
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Non-affiliates for marketing purposes
“Affiliates” isn’t all that specific, but seeing as affiliates and non-affiliates alike can get your data for marketing purposes, it seems safe to say the data sharing pool is large.
Disabling these two toggles
In order to disable these toggles, or any toggles in Privacy Center, you’ll need to visit your Privacy dashboard. You’ll find it on the web via this link, but you can also access it through the T-Life app. According to The Mobile Report, you’ll find this option by heading to the Manage tab, tapping the gear icon, and scrolling down to and tapping on Privacy & policies. Either way, choose your particular T-Mobile brand, then log in if needed.
Here, you’ll find your toggles. To disable these two features specifically, find the toggles next to Share your data to help protect you against fraud and identity theft and Share certain information used to manage financial offerings.
You’re not done yet
Note that these settings apply for individual phone lines, not your entire T-Mobile account. If you have multiple lines on your account, you’ll need to sign in to the dashboard for each line to make these changes.
