By the fall of 2014, Verizon's stealthy new claim on free raw material was outed by Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, a technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. An article in Wired called attention to Hoffman-Andrews' analysis of Verizon's surveillance program and his additional discovery that AT&T was using a similar tracking ID. The article quoted a Verizon spokesperson admitting, "There's no way to turn it off." Hoffman-Andrews observed that even when customers opt out of Verizon's targeted ads, its tracking ID persists, as the corporation bypasses or overrides all signals of a user's intentions, including the Do Not Track setting, Incognito and other private browsing modes, and cookie deletion. The ID is then broadcast to every "unencrypted website a Verizon customer visits from a mobile device. It allows third-party advertisers and websites to assemble a deep, permanent profile of visitors' web browsing habits without their consent." Alarmed by the threat of fresh competition, Google, posing as a privacy advocate, launched a campaign for a new internet protocol that would prevent "header injections" such as Verizon's PrecisionID.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 523