Not disturbed yet? Ponder this: The privacy policy can be theoretically used to justify AT&T offering a service that consists of selling your corporate e-mail messages to your competitors. If AT&T offers that "service" at a profit, it's a legitimate business interest for the company. This sounds like an extreme, but the privacy policy allows for such extremes. Posing another problem, if you deal with data protected by such regulations as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, you now have a whole new set of eyes potentially on that data, with no accountability to your firm or your customers and no means by which you can keep an eye on things.

AT&T isn't protecting its ability to work with the government -- it's granting itself the right to do whatever it wants with any of your information or data passing through its service. While AT&T's spokesmen may well say, "We would never do that," you'd be a fool to believe them. The company employs any number of lawyers, and they didn't pull the "complete ownership" language out of a hat. They are stating, as they mean to state, that they are claiming complete ownership of your data. That is a huge leap from cooperation with government for perceived national security purposes.

Even if you don't use AT&T, you must potentially consider that one of your vendors, or anyone else you exchange e-mails with, might use AT&T. While you may not technically want to give up rights to your information, what happens if these other parties send your data, or data relating to you, through AT&T? The implications are really scary. Again, AT&T says that it's protecting its legitimate business interests, not yours or those of the parties that you deal with.

It gets better. AT&T has also extended its claims on your information by claiming that it can monitor your video usage. There are laws on the book that state that cable companies can't monitor or collect data on viewing habits. AT&T claims that it isn't bound by those regulations because it's an Internet provider and not a cable operator. Unless AT&T is offering pay-per-view terrorist training videos on its network, I don't see how the company can claim that monitoring your video consumption is a matter of cooperating with law enforcement. That data contains value only for commercial interests.

AT&T's concerns are not about national security, but about profit and future profits. So far, even other Internet providers are disagreeing with AT&T's position. Unless there is a substantial backlash, though, it is likely that AT&T will extend this privacy policy to other AT&T operating units. Likewise, other Internet providers may follow suit if AT&T doesn't take a big hit. They might want to start selling your data ... I mean their data ... as well.