You can reach Autumn Ryan to be heard about this subject at [email protected]. Do not transmit sensitive or private information if it’s unsuitable for others to have.

Summary

• Your device upgrades may be enrolling you in the “Personalized Plus” program, contrary to your or any agent knowledge of the program.
• This program, running since at least November 12 2024, escalates prior actions taken by AT&T to sell your “sensitive data” to partners, overriding other CPNI consent choices, and is tooled explicitly to operate “regardless of your state”.
• This program supercedes but includes participation in the “Personalized” program, which they disclose is illegal in the following states: CO, CT, DE, IA, IN, KY, MD, MN, MT, NE, NH, NJ, OR, TN, TX, UT, and VA.
• “Personalized Plus” re-enables the undisclosed sale and transfer of your personal details, precise location, browsing on and off their network, on and off of SSL, your “race or ethnic origin”, your device identifiers, which apps you have installed, who you communicate with, when you communicate with them, which devices you leave near you, which specific videos you watch, and more.
• “CPNI”, “Personalized” and “Personalized Plus”: This is a list in ascending strength of their invasiveness, and it is also the chronological list of programs AT&T has deployed against you in the span of just a few years.
• During a period before 2018, AT&T sold CPNI-enriched data to partners without any requirement to report our consent. AT&T presently argues in court that it was legal. The invention of “Personalized Plus” was to begin a new opt-in attack on the public, where our so-called consent was recorded–not obtained–and then mysteriously reported to their partners.
• AT&T claims that no reading of our messages or calls is possible with their programs.
• However, during and since 2023, the ongoing Chinese espionage attack referred to as “Salt Typhoon” has been found operating in communications infrastructure, reading the contents of selected targets’ conversations.
• AT&T discloses that they enrich this data with the data of third parties who build ad profiles on you.
• I believe a precise map of individuals by ethnicity is being sold by the company Placer Labs Inc, which operates as “placer.ai” without geographical boundaries, and that they possess the data of all or most phone carrier networks and their reselling partners.
• Placer Labs believes their data must be fuzzed in some situations, lest it trivialize identification of individuals.
• The city of Fort Collins procured real-time location data services from Placer Labs Inc approximately one month subsequent to AT&T’s Terms and Conditions for “Personalized Plus” (dated November 12, 2024).
• By August 20, AT&T employees be they retail, corporate and phone were universally unaware of the program.
• By August 23, phone agents found a script to use.
• Documentation has been compiled regarding the behavior of AT&T and its AI Agents on the subject of the program and whether it was even real.

Colorado

4932 Thompson Pkwy, Johnstown

• I found a lingering option for Personalized Plus when scrolling out of the frame of a “See communication options” area of the profile.
• I went to the nearest AT&T retail store, not remembering clearly which one I may have gotten the device from on July 1 2025.
• The agent had no idea what “Personalized Plus” was, so I walked out without resolving anything. He had looked me up in the system but I left him abruptly after reciting what I already knew about the program.

5943 Sky Pond Dr, Loveland

• I went to another store. This too was not the one I had gotten the phone from.
• No recording made, but a sympathetic and helpful mood. I reproduced for him the steps for accessing the setting off the edge of the screen and checking the setting.
• I wasn’t aware yet whether this was on for everyone or not.

Supplemental:

1. Later it would be clear that this program started in 2024 at least, but my only window for being opted in was the device upgrade on July 1 2025.
2. In my time on the phones, after all the physical visits, I start asking for my enrollment date, trying to arrive at a more precise answer before program commencement dates. At this stage, no one even knows what the program is.
3. At this store and others, employees will universally describe a lack of training on the subject. However, this too is curious, next to an admission I get from Longmont’s corporate location, that they get training on the scale of just days, when they need it. The universal lack of “Personalized Plus” knowledge is by design.

4524 Centerplace Dr, Greeley

• This was a “corporate” retail location which I had identified with first-hand knowledge from a just-“retail” location.
• I covered concerns similarly here. The female representative looked up my account.
• I began challenging representatives to Google search for the program I had screenshots of, knowing that the search result pages were empty of information. This was the proximate cause of me needing to go talk to people to learn anything.
• She searches and finds nothing of use.
• I also begin challenging representatives to search their own AT&T public knowledge base, which I confirmed also had nothing.
• She confirms to me that the settings are not something a store employee can modify, because it’s an account-level setting. Lack of knowledge of the program is a separate issue, but this does clarify the cause of disassociation about this program.

Supplemental:

1. I’ve been told by another employee about this by saying they can’t access your Social Security Number to fix something, and they’d have to start a new account for you.

2740 E Harmony Rd, Fort Collins

• I record this interaction.
• I introduce myself as independent and trying to learn about who does know about this program.
• He takes notes on the location and means of checking the setting.
• I haven’t learned anything new, so I’m supplying the training, it seems.
• We got along well, he had an innate interest in doing right by people who just deserved to know.

4515 John F Kennedy Pkwy Unit 4, Fort Collins

• I record this interaction.
• This is the second of two “corporate”-type stores in the area.
• The male representative resists most implications made by AT&T’s own program text, which he’s reading for the first time with my help.
• I perform a full on-phone demo of where and how to find this hidden setting.
• He reports that it is our responsibility to look into the practices of the companies we use.
• I trap him with the Google search challenge.
• I trap him with the AT&T search challenge.
• He seems to get a little more sympathetic, but his positions are unretracted. He believes that this new tier of mass real-time tracking is a status quo, and was eager to offer that explanation.

1387 Sculptor Dr, Loveland

• I record this interaction to start with, but she declines consent and the recording ends.
• This is the location I purchased my phone on July 1 2025.
• In this store, for the first time, my own UI has changed. The “See communication options” in-app browser now crashes and after a hard reload, loads a different page with only communication options.
• She performs the steps on her phone, and her UI is like my own, but her whole family of numbers is disabled in the program.
• She claims that her access (though not mine anymore) is at least “in the right place” to find it. This ignores that even on her large screen, the Privacy Options tab of the page that only mobile lets you access via “See communication options” is a little off.
• Either way, my own access seems stunted, so I discover that I now have to touch the breadcrumb for Profile, and then view the program options.

Supplemental:

1. I suspect at this point that none in her family have yet upgraded their phones since the November 12 2024 program effective date known to me.
2. Curiously, this new UI is more powerful if you can get to it, as it allows me to control both “Personalized Plus”, “Personalized”, and “Decline” in one select box.
3. The new UI would vanish later with a broken “Unavailable” mark, before putting me back into this revised more web-like version of the “See communication options” browser, though behind a breadcrumb navigation.

Call 1

• This took place across two departments.
• Same situation. No knowledge at all. No ability to search it with immediate tools.
• The second representative, in the business department (reason for transfer is unclear) made claims that the program would not have launched yet.
• This was not a graceful way to set off my knowledge of the specifics, but the result was not helpful.

Call 2

• This call was much more useful.
• The male representative I spoke to was listening in a clearly different mode than any others. We were able to locate the Terms and Conditions document with an effective start date of November 12 2024.
• I will have good things to say about this interaction.

Additional calls

• In every case, I am getting to talk to an employee because when I ask for “Personalized Plus”, the system does not understand me. It frequently got things wrong, forcing me to restart my call to escape a misunderstood question.
• Regardless, employees after this point were unavoidably caught off their guard by my ability to cite how many days the policy had been in effect. There was a clear challenge to their perception of what was wrong now.
• The next day employees were immediately able to locate “Personalized Plus” information to read me before either of us could take a breath. I called a few times to confirm that this was now a standard behavior, and it was.
• In addition to the new scripted information, Personalized Plus began appearing in Google search results. Even Google’s AI Overview was able to summarize it now. It is as though someone turned off the robots.txt guard, and it happened overnight.
• I declined CPNI authorization in all cases, but on this new and improved call handling for “Personalized Plus” program, they began making me confirm my physical address. After the second of such attempts, I confirmed but asked why it was being requested. The woman said it was for marketing…
• Mishandled multiple ways on connections. I have a recording of them hanging up for an “invalid number” during an internal transfer that never let me speak to someone.
• The phone bot is really interested in catching questions about TV products, and won’t even offer wireless, or “Mobility”, unless you ask for it.

Longmont

• I recorded this interaction.
• I waited for a rep for 30 minutes while two others had a long-lived meeting by themselves at a table. Two people came to wait after me, and one had an appointment whose time was not a concern. The lone appointment on the restaurant-like TV monitor was for someone else later in the day.
• I selected an additional question this time, about how quickly they can get training for things that do matter. A matter of days was typical.
• He took some notes about me, and he gave me the support number he would use; It is the same public number I have.

Supplemental:

1. Every physical employee I have spoken to has disavowed their ability to “escalate” anything. Their jobs are to hold a phone calling the same hotline I’ve been.
2. I made a stop at a Verizon store and didn’t record, but explained in brief the kind of programs that I knew AT&T was running, and whether they knew of any such things in their own materials. They did not.
3. The pair of Verizon employees seemed surprised that the only so-called “corporate” locations were Greeley and the JFK address.
4. The pair of Verizon employees reported feeling much more capable that they would know how to escalate a question if they felt pressed by a customer–it required no equivocation on my part to reveal a definition of “escalate” that mapped onto their job. That was heartening and markedly different than the mood of any AT&T employee I’ve met in the state of Colorado.

Missouri

6315 Ronald Reagan Dr, Lake Saint Louis

• I recorded this conversation.
• I focused only on the promptness of AT&T training on new and important programs.
• I appear to have been “so” knowledgable that his first question to me was whether I worked in association with AT&T. (I remember encountering Wells Fargo account managers face to face who thought I worked in finance just because I knew what I wanted and wouldn’t take their recommendations blind. Very similar vibes with this representative.)
• The usual excuses appeared, but with more force and no time-table, only hedging that AT&T owed them no training at all if it’s not a setting the in-store representatives can’t alter anyway.
• When I told him the upgrades he sells to customers are nonetheless switching the setting without even his knowledge, he remained unconcerned.
• After our conversation had run its course, I asked if he knew what the plain “Personalized” program was, and he did not. He appeared to feel that his personal concern was not useful.

Supplemental:

1. The plain “Personalized” program is already legal in Missouri.

More

I have a meager lead for contacting an official privacy policy advisor email address, which I will do and follow up.

There are several definitions of “make decisions” in the Terms/Privacy information which include AI by extended definitions supplied by AT&T.

I would like to know if AT&T’s AI is:

1. running unsupervised, handling what AT&T calls “sensitive data in most states”.
2. empowered to handle our fully enriched data with real-time location and ethnicity.
3. capable of approving the sale of our information without AT&T employees’ foreknowledge.

You can reach Autumn Ryan to be heard about this subject at [email protected]. Do not transmit sensitive or private information if it’s unsuitable for others to have.