AT&T accused of Wi-Fi interception, ad injection

Whilst connected to an AT&T free Wi-Fi hotspot at Dulles Airport, Mayer noticed that webpages were becoming covered by adverts in unusual places.

AT&T on Wednesday confirmed that it recently intercepted Web traffic at WiFi hotspots in order to inject ads into the pages that users were visiting. The company’s hotspot at the Dulles global Airport in Virginia was found to be using ad-injecting code to deliver more advertisements to users while they browse the web. At a minimum, inserting ads without warning users ahead of time isn’t a great practice. RaGaPa had made its way onto the machine from the AT&T hotspot.

In addition to finding extra ads on websites that are already ad-supported, Mayer was seeing advertising on educational and government websites, including those for Stanford and even the FCC, where there shouldn’t be such sponsorship.

“Last I checked, Stanford doesn’t hawk fashion accessories or telecom service”.

Mayer went on to explore other websites and found that all of them had similar ads.

Mayer pointed out that AT&T’s Wi-Fi terms of service don’t mention the ads. AT&T provides a link for users to opt out of being included in those marketing reports. Depending on which Wi-Fi hotspot you log on to, you could be seeing a lot more.

“An airport providing W-iFi itself and an airport paying AT&T to just take care of it would probably be treated the same”, John Bergmayer, senior staff attorney at advocacy group Public Knowledge, told.

Mayer, who is also a lawyer, wrote that the legality of ad injection is a “messy subject”, but there are regulations and laws that would appear to prohibit it, such as wiretapping and pen register statutes and net neutrality rules. These ads are annoying to look at, clutter up your screen, seriously impact your phone or PC’s performance, gobble up data, interfere with existing website code, reduce your privacy and generally jeopardize the security of your device. Mayer points out that there’s an incentive for AT&T to try to get some income off the back of a free service, “but this model of advertising injection is particularly unsavory”.