Received an email from Google Fi that their policy is to “opt you in” to sell your phone-call and purchase info to advertisers. They call the data your CPNI — “Customer Proprietary Network Information”. Making this an opt-out when it’s a combo of your shopping data plus phone-call data (including destination and location) plus Google identity seems pretty egregious to me.
Anyway, the emailed notice is easy to overlook as just another policy update that you wouldn’t do anything about. But you can opt out.
At https://fi.google.com/account, go to “Privacy & security”, and deselect “Allow CPNI sharing”. It’s not in the Fi app; you have to do it in a browser.
There’s no link in the email to opt out. The email gives you instructions on how to opt out and a link to the Fi website, but no direct link.
The instructions also don’t work by default, because once you log in to the Fi website, it automatically redirects you to the Fi app which conveniently doesn’t have the opt out option available to toggle. You have to either uninstall the Fi app or manually turn off its ability to open fi.google.com URLs to actually opt out.
I don’t think that was an accident for even half a second, and I’m pretty sure that it just pushed me to switch carriers.
Weird. In the email I received, I just clicked the first link and a page opened letting me know I had opted out.
Yeah, not for me. It just went to the main Fi account page when I actually got it to open instead of it trying to open in the Fi app. Maybe an A/B test or something, I don’t know.
What I do know is that I just switched wireless carriers, because fuck all that noise. That shit really rubbed me the wrong way. I might be on the road to completely divorcing myself from Google at this point.
Are you comfortable sharing what country / state you’re in? I didn’t have an option to opt out in the Email and I’m in PA, USA.
California.
This is the link that was in the email I received:
http://g.co/fi/cpni-opt-out?utm_source=transactional&utm_campaign=&utm_medium=email&utm_content=&utm_term=___``I guess it just one click because I was logged into the web sms page as I don’t like using my phone for anything.