There’s a long, excellent profile of the new AT&T and its CEO Randall Stephenson in Fortune today, which you should read. AT&T has transformed itself into a media colossus by buying Time Warner, and understanding how the company plans to use its incredible array of content from HBO, CNN, TNT, and others in combination with its huge distribution networks across mobile broadband, DirecTV, and U-verse is important for anyone who cares about tech, media, or both. Seriously, go read it.

Here’s the part I want you to pay attention to: two quick paragraphs describing how AT&T sees the future of advertising across those media properties and networks. It’s the same plan AT&T has laid out before, but it’s more specific now, and that specificity makes it chilling. I’ve bolded the scary part:

“Say you and your neighbor are both DirecTV customers and you’re watching the same live program at the same time,” says Brian Lesser, who oversees the vast data-crunching operation that supports this kind of advertising at AT&T. “We can now dynamically change the advertising. Maybe your neighbor’s in the market for a vacation, so they get a vacation ad. You’re in the market for a car, you get a car ad. If you’re watching on your phone, and you’re not at home, we can customize that and maybe you get an ad specific to a car retailer in that location.” Such targeting has caused privacy headaches for Yahoo, Google, and Facebook, of course. That’s why AT&T requires that customers give permission for use of their data; like those other companies, it anonymizes that data and groups it into audiences—for example, consumers likely to be shopping for a pickup truck—rather than targeting specific individuals. Regardless of how you see a directed car ad, say, AT&T can then use geolocation data from your phone to see if you went to a dealership and possibly use data from the automaker to see if you signed up for a test-drive—and then tell the automaker, “Here’s the specific ROI on that advertising,” says Lesser. AT&T claims marketers are paying four times the usual rate for that kind of advertising.

So, yeah. This is a terrifying vision of permanent surveillance.

In order to make this work, AT&T would have to:

Own the video services you’re watching so it can dynamically place targeted ads in your streams

Collect and maintain a dataset of your personal information and interests so it can determine when it should target this car ad to you

Know when you’re watching something so it can actually target the ads

Track your location using your phone and combine it with the ad-targeting data to see if you visit a dealership after you see the ads

Collect even more data about you from the dealership to determine if you took a test-drive

Do all of this tracking and data collection repeatedly and simultaneously for every ad you see

Aggregate all of that data in some way for salespeople to show clients and justify a 4x premium over other kinds of advertising, including the already scary-targeted ads from Google and Facebook.

If this was a story about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, this scheme would cause a week-long outrage cycle. It is outrageous, especially when you consider that AT&T also routinely hands over customer information to the government, is under investigation for illegally selling customer location data to shady third parties, and is generally about as protective of your data as a hotel front desk guarding a bowl of mints.

a terrifying vision of permanent surveillance

AT&T can claim up and down that it’s asked for permission to use customer information to do this, but there is simply no possible way the average customer has ever even read their AT&T contracts, let alone puzzled out that they’re signing up to be permanently tracked and influenced by targeted media in this way. People are already convinced that Facebook is secretly listening to them through their phones; if you explicitly offered them the choice of AT&T tracking everything they watch and everywhere they go, it’s a safe bet that they would say no.

In fact, this plan might sound broadly familiar to you because it is largely similar to the plan former AOL CEO Tim Armstrong proposed to Verizon when he combined AOL and Yahoo under the Oath brand at that carrier: build an ad network on the billions of page views served by Oath properties, combine that data with Verizon’s network data, and sell better-targeted ads at a premium. (I also called that plan a nightmare at the time, you’ll recall.)

You know why that never worked out? Verizon executives refused to turn over the network data, citing customer privacy. To repeat: Verizon, which aggressively tracks customers using unremovable supercookies, thought a plan like this was a step too far.

Maybe AT&T should compete with Verizon on that front, instead of putting Iron Thrones in their cellphone stores.