It's not been a good week for AT&T with all of the ire the company has taken from frustrated iPhone users who can not MMS or tether and who will not get a nice subsidy discount on Apple's shiny new product. To top things off, Saul Hansell is now using the megaphone of the NYTimes to take the carrier to task for its privacy policy, or more specifically for its ability to use our location information to its own ends:

But the company [AT&T] is saying more clearly than most other big companies that it knows a lot about you, that it will use that information to help it make more money in any number of ways, that it will keep the data for as long as you remain a customer, and that it can be forced to give all that information to the government without giving you the chance to object

I suspect that all current telcos are buying themselves options here given how unpopular wireless carriers are with their subscribers in the first place, I'd think that they might want to keep a close ear to how users might react the first time they are interrupted with a pushed ad that uses information the carrier has obtained and sold by virtue of the privacy policy.

Who knows? Now that Sprint is selling bandwidth to other types of devices, we might have an opening for an MVNO that is more worried about end users than protecting its own business model. It didn't work the first time around but with the increasing amount of power that device manufacturers have with their branded smartphones, should the carriers get too egregious, it might work next time.