Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Mobile User Privacy Bill of Rights

Parker Higgins, March 2, 2012, "Mobile User Privacy Bill of Rights," Electronic Frontier Foundation Deeplinks Blog.

From the article: "Mobile smartphone apps represent a powerful technology that will only become more important in the years to come. But the unique advantages of the smartphone as a platform—a device that's always on and connected, with access to real world information like user location or camera and microphone input—also raise privacy challenges. And given the sensitivity of the data that many consumers store on their phones, the stakes are even higher for manufacturers, carriers, app developers, and mobile ad networks to respect user privacy in order to earn and retain the ever-important trust of the public.

Fortunately, frameworks exist for understanding the privacy rights and expectations of the users. The following guide of best practices pulls from documents like EFF's Bill of Privacy Rights for Social Network Users and the recently released White House white paper "Consumer Data Privacy in a Networked World" to set a baseline for what mobile industry players must do to respect user privacy."  Read more