AT&T

Reasons to avoid

1. In March 2024, AT&T disclosed that data on 73 million current and former customers — including Social Security numbers, account passcodes, and dates of birth — had been circulating on the dark web, likely since 2019. The company denied a breach for years before finally acknowledging it.fortune.com2024-03-30
2. AT&T secretly gave the NSA access to a dedicated surveillance room (Room 641A) inside its San Francisco facility, where splitters copied all internet traffic — domestic and international — and fed it directly to the government. The program expanded to at least eight AT&T buildings across the U.S.theintercept.com2018-06-25
3. The FTC sued AT&T for secretly throttling customers on "unlimited" data plans — slowing speeds by up to 90% without adequate disclosure. AT&T settled for $60 million in 2019, one of the largest telecom consumer protection settlements in FTC history.ftc.gov2019-11-05
4. AT&T was ordered to pay $80 million to the FTC — part of a $105 million multi-agency settlement — for billing customers for unauthorized third-party charges (a practice called "cramming") and deliberately hiding those charges in bill summaries.ftc.gov2014-10-08
5. AT&T spent heavily lobbying against net neutrality protections and was a key contributor to the FCC's 2017 rollback, helping eliminate rules that prevented carriers from throttling or prioritizing internet traffic.opensecrets.org2022-06-01
6. In August 2024, over 17,000 AT&T workers in nine southeastern states went on strike — the longest telecom strike in the region's history — after the CWA accused AT&T of bargaining in bad faith over wages, forced overtime, and healthcare benefits.npr.org2024-09-05