Mobile Privacy
Photo By: Ryan Sutton, All Rights Reserved
James Kendrick over on jkOnTheRun took an interesting leap from an a post written by Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM on mobile advertising. Now I have been a ‘victim’ of mobile advertising since AT&T who I have service from is one of the leaders in this area. I get a text message about once a month that is an advertisement for some AT&T service, the message claims that the messages are free of charge which is nice to know if I did not have an unlimited text messaging plan I wouldn’t be paying for AT&Ts marketing campaign.
The next jump that was mentioned by James was that since most phones these days GPSs in them and the concern that advertisers would have access to this. This is a realistic fear, but it is nice that every GPS phone that I have used you have to grant applications the ability to get the location. IF some point int he future there is some way to hook into positing through a Java[script] app on a web page this would get even more scary.
After reading this though I was thinking about what applications I so grant the access to position data. Obviously Google Maps is on, Google does have that whole ‘Don’t be evil.’ policy so I’m ok with that for now. The one that got my mind running was Shozu though, I use this app to post photos to Flickr as I take them and as part of the app it geotagges the photo for me. This application would basically have access to location data from every where I took a picture. Would assume that it wouldn’t be a stretch that a company with that kind of access may chose to use that data for ‘evil’ ( marketing ). Now this is data that I generally consider public anyways since I am posting it on Flickr in the end. I would be curious if marketing companies look at sites like Flickr and say things like, “There are a lot of geotagged photos in this area of the city, lots of techy people must be there a lot.”
The concern I have is that a lot of peoples reaction to these fears is that the government should step in in some way. I don’t feel that this is the answer, consumers and reviewers should look closely at devices they allow to collect personal data, if a company starts abusing their power I am fairly confident that people will stop using their service. For example if it was discovered tomorrow that the iPhone was sending all your position data from navigation to Apple so that they could plan where to build new Apple Stores. I’m guessing the iPhone would become very unpopular very quickly. Not to mention AT&T’s stock would be cheaper then Circuit City.
Hopefully we don’t have to worry about this problem anytime soon, and the worst we have to deal with is text message coupons for free ring tones.