In a letter which contains the answer to four prominent House lawmakers, who asked ISPs to explain their user monitoring activities, AT&T said it has plans to snoop on its own users for advertising purposes, but claims that Google's practices are much more worrying.

The letter begins by stating that the ISP does not engage in the so-called behavioral targeted advertising. Quickly, the message to the four lawmakers points out that advertising networks such as the one owned by Google have evolved beyond merely tracking the websites that users visit, to rather recording a user's entire browsing, searches and pageviews, through a variety of means such as cookies, downloadable or embedded software.

Strikingly, Google's name appears several times in the first paragraphs of the six-page letter. AT&T details how the search engine king parses emails and keeps detailed user profiles.

AT&T goes on to promise that when it will implement such user tracking capabilities, it will do so "the right way," namely by implementing four principles: the company will give customers control over the use of their personal information; AT&T will ensure transparency; it will protect its customers' privacy; and it will provide customers with value. Again, the company underlines that it never used behavioral targeted advertising so far, not even as part of testing.

Furthermore, the company says that it favors a so-called "opt-in" system, through which customers will give their explicit consent to being the subject of behavioral targeted advertising, when the company will decide to implement such a feature in its online operations.