Passpoint Secure Hotspots

In doing a little research on this new behavior I noticed today, I have discovered a LOT of hatred over this behavior. I’ll attempt to be a little more eloquent on my post, but this is a very skeevy behavior.

Sitting in the Oakland Airport this morning, I was streaming a video. It started to chunk out and buffer. Hrm, I have full bars... why am I connected to WiFi? Passpoint Secure, what’s this? 

1) Turned off auto-join, and noticed there was not an option to ‘forget’ the network.

2) Left settings. Still connected to the network. Turned off WiFi.

3) Turned on WiFi, Passpoint Secure was auto-joined. Went back into settings, auto-join was re-enabled. 

4) Turned off auto-join again, this time with an angry finger. 

5) Rinsed and repeated multiple different methods of attempting to REMOVE the ability for this hostile, foreign network from connecting to my gear. 

6) My solution - I placed random characters in all the forms for manual settings (dns, proxy, subnet, etc). Since it is attempting to use bogus domain data, it fails to connect now. Problem solved for one location...

AT&T, I pay you a rediculous amount of money for internet and phone service, we are into a decades long relationship now. As the bills continue to rise, the customer service continues to fall and horrible, blanket decisions like this continue to mount; you are losing me, and because I pay the pills, my entire family’s business. 

This is needs to be opt-out at a MINIMUM, and not ‘if you don’t want to use this unsafe connection method, you need to sabotage your devices settings’.