Sprint said the charge will help it keep its network running smoothly for all the data-hungry customers, and tried to put some happy talk around what is, essentially, a rate hike.

“Sprint wants its customers to experience the range of entertainment and productivity possibilities available with today’s wireless technology,” Sprint consumer business President Bob H. Johnson said in a statement. “While some of our competitors impose overage charges and complex plans, Sprint continues to provide a worry-free, unlimited data experience while on the Sprint network. This is responsible, sustainable and reflects our commitment to simplicity and value.”

Existing Sprint smartphone customers are not affected unless they upgrade to or activate another smartphone, the company said.

When Sprint CEO Dan Hesse joined the company three years ago, the third-largest carrier was bleeding subscribers from having a poor reputation for customer service and facing stiff competition from the likes of AT&T, which holds the exclusive on the iPhone.

Since then, Sprint has stemmed the losses, mostly by beefing up its customer service and by investing in the prepaid sector to attract a wider audience during the economic downturn. Going forward, Sprint looks to its 4G strategy for growth through its ownership stake in WiMax-provider Clearwire. Next up, Hesse joins Walt Mossberg onstage.

3:45 pm: Walt welcomes Dan Hesse to the stage. You can’t have mobile without networks, says Walt. You’ve led the way on 4G; tell us about it.

3:46 pm: Dan: We are getting San Francisco up soon, and will have 120 million POPs by the end of the year, or about a third of the country.

He explains what 4G is: 3G for was email and Web pages, but 4G is for multimedia and video.

The best analogy is that 4G is the wide open freeway vs. an interstate that provides the same speeds, but you have to stop along the way.

3:48 pm: Walt: Why are you using WiMax when the two other carriers are using LTE?

Hesse: Back in 2008, we wanted to be first, and WiMax was available right now. (Lots to do with TDD, and other technical mumbo jumbo). Technically, there’s no difference. I can’t deny that LTE will be a bigger ecosystem, but we couldn’t wait. We thought the market was ready.

With the success of the iPhone, we thought it was ready now.

Walt: How much leadership did it give you?

Hesse: Well, it made Verizon move a lot faster….In 2010, we’ll have 120 million POPs, and the EVO and Epic (two 4G phones) have been really successful.

Walt: How successful?

Hesse: If you were to go to Clearwire’s wholesale numbers, you should think of Sprint’s lion’s share of the wholesale numbers.

Walt: Was it worth the investment?

Hesse: I think so.

3:53 pm: Hesse: 4G is one element of many.

Walt: You like Consumer Reports, unlike the guy here earlier [AT&T's Glenn Lurie].

Hesse: Sprint is the fastest growing brand of postpaid in the U.S.–not the Nextel brand, where we’ve been losing subscribers.

3:55 pm: Walt: Are you going to get the iPhone?

Hesse: Can’t say.

Walt: Would you like the iPhone?

Hesse: Under the right conditions, yes, I would. It’s a wonderful phone.

3:56 pm: Backing up a bit, Walt now asks about an industry trend toward tiered pricing for data plans, where the more you use, the more you pay.

Sprint hasn’t yet limited users’ traffic.

Hesse: Customers will pay a premium for simplicity. Even if it’s not in their best economic interest, they will go with the unlimited plan. We were the first to come out with truly unlimited text, voice and data with the Simply Everything plan.

3:59 pm: Walt: Are you not going to do tiered pricing?

Hesse: So far, we aren’t, he says, which gets a round of applause from the audience. But Sprint did up the cost of the unlimited plans of the most capable devices on the network.

4:00 pm: Walt: Unlimited means unlimited or doesn’t it?

Hesse: No, it doesn’t. What if they have the SlingBox streaming 24×7?

4:01 pm: Hesse: The trend is toward one plan for all of your devices, like tablets, phones, PCs, etc.

Walt: Are you going to offer plans for all those devices?

Hesse: We are thinking about it. That’s the next step to simplicity. Three years ago, it was about one device.

4:02 pm: Walt: People aren’t counting minutes, now they are counting megabytes and things people don’t understand.

Hesse: Something has to give; what’s going to be the form? Do you have meters, do you have tiers, do you increase the price of the unlimited plans?

Another option is to have a lot more spectrum available to add capacity at a lower cost.

Walt: Are you talking about taking away the spectrum that the elderly use to watch their TV?

Hesse: If more spectrum is available, you can use more frequencies, which is a lot less expensive than splitting cell sites and putting in more towers.

Walt: There’s some confusion about Clearwire. They are opening stores and selling laptops and modems. You own most of that company, and they are building your WiMax network. Why are they competing with you?

Hesse: I have a wholesale business that resells minutes to Leap, so it’s the same thing.

4:06 pm: Walt’s giving Hesse grief about the structure of the Clearwire deal. Despite Sprint owning roughly 54 percent of the company, Sprint doesn’t control the board.

Walt: Who did that deal?

Hesse: Two thumbs pointing at himself [me]. When you have this many owners of the company, we can’t agree.

4:08 pm: Walt: What’s the value of 4G?

Hesse: The experience is really fast, and we offer unlimited plans on 4G. There’s a five-gigabyte cap on 3G, but 4G is completely unlimited.

Walt’s curious if 4G is really life-changing and transformative. Sprint’s beating the other guys by 2x, not 10x or 20x.

Hesse: My son showed me his speed test on his EVO at home, and it was over 8 mbps, so it depends.

4:11 pm: Questions from the audience. The Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley asks about the potential deal between Clearwire and T-Mobile, which may be falling apart because of Clearwire’s recent $1 billion in debt that it has raised.

Hesse deflects the question despite several reports to the contrary, by saying he didn’t know anything about that.

Another audience question: What’s your stance on network neutrality?

Hesse: The FCC has come out with a proposal, and we are very supportive of it.

The January 2011 issue ranking cellphones and services carries this headline on the cover: “Best and worst providers (Sorry AT&T).”

I’m going to try to pick up a copy this morning and will then update, but here are the highlights, according to the Houston Chronicle. AT&T got the magazine’s full black dot rating (that’s as low as it gets) in almost every nationwide category, while Verizon topped the rankings.

AT&T sent out the following statement in response to the rankings: “We take this seriously and we continually look for new ways to improve the customer experience. The fact is wireless customers have choices and a record number of them chose AT&T in the third quarter, significantly more than our competitors. Hard data from independent drive tests confirms AT&T has the nation’s fastest mobile broadband network with our nearest competitor 20 percent slower on average nationwide and our largest competitor 60 percent slower on average nationwide. And, our dropped call rate is within 1/10 of a percent–the equivalent of just one call in a thousand–of the industry leader.”

On the device side, the iPhone (the same one that the magazine once recommended against buying) tops the list of phones available at AT&T, the Droid X and Samsung Fascinate tied for best Verizon option and Samsung’s Epic and Vibrant top the options at Sprint and T-Mobile, respectively.

Here’s a radio interview BoomTown did earlier this week on San Francisco’s KQED “Forum” show, hosted by Michael Krasny.

The topic was a report in the The Wall Street Journal that certain third-party apps on Facebook were grabbing information about users in ways that violated the social networking site’s privacy guidelines.

Privacy advocates cried foul, while others thought it was more a tempest in a teapot– which I, NPR reporter Laura Sydell and Marc Rotenberg, executive director for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, discussed.

One conclusion, which you will understand after listening: Facebook definitely does not cause cancer.

Here’s the audio:

“EPIC urges the Commission to investigate Google, determine the extent of the harm to consumer privacy and safety,” EPIC said in its complaint. “[And it asks that the Commission] require Google to provide Gmail users with opt-in consent to the Google Buzz service, require Google to give Gmail users meaningful control over personal information, require Google to provide notice to and request consent from Gmail users before making material changes to their privacy policy in the future, and seek appropriate injunctive and compensatory relief.”

Another embarrassing blow for Google (GOOG), which has spent the better part of a week being pilloried for its unfortunate misstep. Responding to EPIC’s complaint, Google again stressed its efforts to improve Buzz and, somewhat ironically, thanked the group for airing its concerns.

“We designed Buzz to make it easy for users to connect with other people and have conversations about the things that interest them,” the company said. “Buzz was launched only a week ago. We’ve already made a few changes based on user feedback, and we have more improvements in the works. We look forward to hearing more suggestions and will continue to improve the Buzz experience with user transparency and control top of mind. We also welcome dialogue with EPIC and appreciate hearing directly from them about their concerns. Our door is always open to organizations with suggestions about our products and services.”

Evidently, Buzz is a work in progress to which all are free to contribute–even if they do so in the form of an FTC complaint.

And that means? Hard to say.

In a letter (pdf) to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, David Vladeck, the FTC’s director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, says his agency would be happy to talk to EPIC about its concerns. But that’s about all he’s promising for now.

Just as important, Vladeck points out that he can’t and won’t say whether the FTC is formally investigating EPIC’s complaint: “Please be advised, however, that any Commission investigation is non-public until the Commission decides to issue a formal complaint or investigation. As a result, we can neither confirm nor deny that we are conducting an investigation of the issues raised by your complaint.”

So there you go. Either the Feds are taking this very seriously or they’re not.

As I’ve said before, Facebook may face some regulatory blowback for its privacy overhaul–otherwise known as the “please share as much of yourself as you can” campaign–in the U.S., and more likely, in Europe. But unless the social networking service starts hearing from  advertisers, I’m not sure how much farther this goes.

Today, a coalition of privacy groups, led by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission asking the regulators to force Facebook to turn on its old settings. The complaint, and Facebook’s response, are at the bottom of this post.

I have no idea if the Feds will end up getting Facebook to do anything. But the privacy groups can still accomplish a lot without injunctive relief.

“What we’re going to do is drag Facebook into the halls of the FTC, and have them examine all of their policies,” says Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, one of the groups backing the complaint.

That could certainly slow down the company. So could inquiries from European governments, which have become more inclined to regulate American technology outfits. Just ask Microsoft (MSFT).

The real concern for Facebook is if the private sector starts complaining. Recall that Facebook only reversed course on its ill-fated Beacon project two years ago after advertisers started questioning the program, which was designed to share your shopping and branding choices with your pals.

Since that debacle, marketers seem to have gotten comfortable with Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg has a real ad business now. And I’ve yet to hear a peep from big brands with second thoughts. But if the privacy blowback gets big enough, that could change.

Again, I don’t think the proposition that Facebook is offering its users–the opportunity to share every detail about their online lives with anyone with a browser–is an inherently bad one. There are lots of people who are comfortable with the notion.

The problem is that Facebook has switched course midstream. It started off as a site that limited users’ information to the outside world and now wants to invert that. But the switch has been badly explained, done in such a way that many users don’t understand what happened.

Facebook says this criticism is overblown and that lots of people do understand the switch. Spokesman Barry Schnitt says at least half of Facebook’s users have made changes to their privacy settings since the new rules went into place. Which means, he argues, that at least half of its users understand them.

Entirely possible. But Facebook now has up to 350 million users. Which means that tens of millions of users could be unaware of what’s going on. And they’ll only find out when their party pictures or baby videos or whatever turn up on Google (GOOG).

Facebook could easily solve this by clearly explaining that its “Share With Everyone” option really does mean everyone and–crucially–making it an opt-in proposition. But then adoption rates would shrivel, and the company wouldn’t be able to pull off its goal: Making as much of the site as public as possible.

This one isn’t going away anytime soon.

EPIC’s complaint, followed below by Facebook’s response:

EPIC-FacebookComplaint –

Facebook’s response:

We’ve had productive discussions with dozens of organizations around the world about the recent changes and we’re disappointed that EPIC has chosen to share their concerns with the FTC while refusing to talk to us about them.

Facebook’s plan to provide users control over their privacy and how they share content is unprecedented in the Internet age. We have gone to great lengths to inform users about our platform changes, beginning with our July announcement; founder Mark Zuckerberg’s open letter to our 350 million users; our robust press and analyst outreach; the notice-and-comment framework for our new privacy policy; and simple customization tools for users.

We’re pleased that so many users have already gone through the process of reviewing and updating their privacy settings and are impressed that so many have chosen to customize their settings, demonstrating the effectiveness of Facebook’s user empowerment and transparency efforts. Of course, the new tools offer users the opportunity to decide on privacy with every photo, link or status update they wish to post, so the process of personalizing privacy on Facebook will continue.

We discussed the privacy program with many regulators, including the FTC, prior to launch and expect to continue to work with them in the future.