It's frustrating, the internet has become such a creepy "you are the product" medium. The more of this I see, I start to feel like I don't want to be a part of it anymore.
I wonder if an MVNO would be less creepy than Verizon? Probably not, I'd bet they're even sleazier.
So presumably any other US provider would be better than Verizon.
For whatever it's worth, I left them recently for this very reason (your choice is yours, mine is mine, no preaching or judgement here either) – I ended up having a few minute conversation with the confused (but nice) call rep who didn't understand what they were doing but seemed to empathize as I explained it. Ultimately, will my explanation matter? Probably not, but it was all the power I felt I had, beyond cutting them off from my monthly payments.
While still not trustworthy in my book, t-mobile is definitely an upgrade, at least in this regard.
Can anyone think of a way to automate the collection of those ads and linked clients? Crowd-sourcing maybe?
Really, the only reasons surveillance as a business model has worked is most people don't realize the extent that it is going on and by the time they do a monopoly or oligopoly has already established itself. Taking advantage of ignorance is at best rude and offensive, and at worst it should be criminal.
Unfortunately, the laws have yet to catch up to abuses like Verizon's MitM rewriting of HTTP headers. Worse, fixing laws and enforcing them against these modern abuses is going to be very hard: regulatory capture's a 'helluva drug.