This is somewhat unrelated… but not entirely, so here goes:
I recently got a Verizon 5G home internet router.
I live in a shit tier motel posing as an apartment building, doesn’t actually have wifi or cable despite advertising it. Hooray for living off of SSDI.
Anyway, a few weeks after setting it up, I go into the App to check my bill amount and date, make sure they’re tied to my correct account.
… In my account activity history is a complete pdf receipt for the previous owner of the phone number that my ‘gateway’ is now using.
I’ve got their order number, full name, address, the exact model of phone they bought along with case and screen protector and charger, the imei, the last 4 digits of the card they paid with, and their signature.
Verizon just fucking did not care enough to wipe this receipt out of the account history after … presumably this person stopped paying, cancelled their service, fucking died, who knows.
So now its part of my account history after Verizon reassigned their old phone number to my 5g gateway.
… And I just checked again, yep, two weeks later, its still there.
Behold, your personal data is safe with Verizon, you’re in good hands.
Eeeph. That’s not good at all.
Bruh
You think if I found this person, and I told them what happened, they could sue Verizon for breach of privacy?
Ummm not sure if you want that. They might misunderstsnd and assume you hacked verizon and stole their data. People are weird. But if you wanna take that risk, sure, be my guest.
(I dont think lawsuit is going anywhere tho)
My friends have t-mobile home internet, and almost talked me into switching. I’ve only held back because I’m not even happy with the mobile service I have through t-mobile. We’re extremely middle of fucking nowhere so I guess there isn’t really a right answer here
Well, if you don’t get good speeds on your mobile phones, then you’re definitely not going to enjoy the home internet experience. That’s for sure, since it’s lower priority than the phones are. I used to have it while living in the middle of nowhere and inside my house I had real trouble getting a signal but there was one edge of my house that I could put the gateway in the window and get good signal and then use that to broadcast Wi-Fi and use Wi-Fi calling on my devices and that worked out quite well. The local ISP offered like 10 MBPS over DSL and I was getting 70 MBPS with the home internet gateway. So it worked out extremely well. But that was just my experience with it.
I wonder how they define “active”. Assigned IMEI contacting the tower, or actual data usage? They have a “Backup Internet” plan, which makes me think it’s the former.
That would be my guess. Although why they would want to kick somebody off the network who was paying them monthly is beyond me.
i don’t think they would do that, they’re the most profitable customers. my guess is they’re targeting…
people that just have them for their rv or cabin or something. don’t use 'em during the winter (i.e. now). these devices use excess tower capacity, are linked to a home service address that would use a specific one, and are only supposed to be used at that address.
people who are using the service, maybe even only ‘at home’, but are using ‘unsanctioned’ third-party hardware instead of the carrier’s.
Yeah, that would make sense that they’re targeting customers who are using the hardware or software in ways that they would rather it not be used. Because otherwise, if they weren’t using the service at all, then they aren’t pulling from the tower and therefore they aren’t hurting the capacity at all. So it wouldn’t make sense to kick them off.
It honestly sounds like a good idea.
I mean, it would suck to have it turned off if you were just using it as a backup and never actually needed to use it, but at the same time it is a good way for them to cover their ass when someone (or a bunch of someones) forget to turn it off and try to recoup the money they spent on something they didn’t use and inevitably sue T-Mobile which would cost them more just for the courts to tell that person that it’s their problem than it would for them to turn it off and back on.
It would probably be wise to send out notifications prior to though.
Fair enough, they could give like a 30 day and then a 15 day notice that they were going to disable it. That way you had plenty of time to know that it was going to happen unless you changed something.
