Strike that: 17,000 AT&T workers down tools in California, Nevada

Re: How to cancel your AT&T cellular service

> Still, if you don't give two shits about your privacy, then by all means; remain their customer. Enjoy!

I love this guy. He thinks corporations want to differentiate themselves with their privacy policy. That's adorkable.

Here's the reality: They're all the same. They will schlurp your data and sell it, and consider telling you or getting permission to be optional -- and the law agrees, because the people getting screwed don't have money, and in our legal system money is the only thing that talks. But ignore that; Let's say you find your unicorn cellular provider who has that -- they are still only going to be able to sell you a cell phone that will, of course, schlurp your data and sell it. They don't even make phones anymore that don't do this -- Pretty much anything after 3G started rolling out does it, and before that it was becoming commonplace. And that'll still leave you with the government schlurping up all your data -- and as we're starting to see, they don't mind selling that data to corporations.

You're screwed no matter how you approach it. And just FYI, AT&T isn't any different than the rest on cooperating with the government -- it's quite strange, almost like getting arrested and disappeared off to the American version of the Star Chamber before suffering some unspeakable horror at the behest of "national security" gives high levels of compliance. This invasive and pervasive surveillance is hardwired into everything; Even children's toys. You're not a person anymore, you aren't even a citizen or a consumer, or even a *number* anymore... you are now a product. We accept Visa or Mastercard, but not American Depressed.

AT&T was never UDPed.

I can't even remember them being threatened with a UDP. Compuserve, Netcom, UUNET, AOL, @home, BBN, Erols, TIAC were all threatened with a UDP for hosting spammers, and a couple were actively UDPed. These are just the larger outfits that I can remember off the top of my head, there were many smaller companies. I issued quite a few cancels myself. But AT&T? Not that I remember. (I started running news servers in the days of Bnews & UUCP; I still run a hobby server based on INN).

TINC

Worse than you know...

I can't speak to "AT&T" per se, but before they got gobbled back into the borg collective, I worked for PacBell. You think the customer facing techs are bad at their jobs? Those are the *good* ones. The bad ones were shuffled off to be internal support (called "Official Communications Services"--OCS--at the the time). Even the shop steward at the headquarters building agreed that he had to deal with a prize crew of screw ups. They did manage to glom onto a couple of actually competent techs to unravel the more egregious errors committed by the usual run of incompetents.

The Lowest

I had the misfortune of working for AT&T for about nine months, and second everything you say. Anyone who is employable leaves the cess pool as soon as they find an out. The dregs of humanity remain. It's really a very efficient selection process for building a pool of workers who'll put up with anything.