Lawmakers Initiate Inquiry on Mobile Location Tracking

On Monday the Privacy Subcommittee scheduled a hearing for May 10 called “Protecting Mobile Privacy: Your Smartphones, Tablets, Cell Phones and Your Privacy.” The Subcommittee invited officials from the Department of Justice, the FTC and representatives from Google and Apple to testify. “This hearing is the first step in making certain that federal laws protecting consumers’ privacy, particularly when it comes to mobile devices, keep pace with advances in technology,” said Franken.

Two researchers said last week that devices using Apple’s iOS 4 software update are “intentionally” recording and storing each users’ latitude and longitude coordinates, along with a time stamp (CD April 22 p6). A Wall Street Journal article published Friday detailed how Google’s Android smartphones also transmit user locations back to the company’s databases. The revelations have drawn the ire of several lawmakers including Franken and Markey, for what they say could potentially expose children’s location data to “malicious persons.”

Markey plans to introduce a bill to protect childrens’ mobile privacy with a Do Not Track requirement, he said. Markey said in October he would target the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) for a major overhaul in 2011 in order to incorporate new technological innovations. “Unprotected personal location information could be a treasure trove for troublemakers,” Markey said in a news release Saturday. “Apple needs to ensure that an iPhone doesn’t become an iTrack, and an iTrack doesn’t become an iTragedy, especially for children and their families.” Markey’s spokeswoman could not confirm any details or a time line for the bill’s introduction. Markey was an author of COPPA and former chairman of the House Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee.

Google, in contrast to its Street View debacle with Wi-Fi location data collection, is not collecting location data on Android phones without user opt-in, the company said. “We provide users with notice and control over the collection, sharing and use of location in order to provide a better mobile experience on Android devices,” a spokesman for Google told us Monday. “Any location data that is sent back to Google location servers is anonymized and is not tied or traceable to a specific user.” Calls placed to Apple weren’t immediately returned.

Last week Franken critiqued Apple’s data tracking policies for making children more vulnerable. “Anyone who finds a lost or stolen iPhone or iPad or who has access to any computer used to sync one of these devices could easily download and map out a customer’s precise movements for months at a time,” he wrote. “Furthermore, there is no indication that this file is any different for underage iPhone or iPad users, meaning that the millions of children and teenagers who use iPhone or iPad devices also risk having their location collected and compromised.”

But implementing a law to prevent devices from tracking the locations of children is trickier than it sounds, said Fran Maier, president of TRUSTe, a third-party privacy evaluation firm for Internet companies like Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and IBM. “I'm not sure that [Rep. Markey’s idea] is very practical,” said Maier. “In order not to track children, you kind of have to track them.” Smartphone makers would have to first identify which users are children in order to prevent tracking their locations, said Maier. “Which means you may be giving up some privacy rights in order not to track them,” she said. “But there is a lot of room for industry to be much more transparent about the information that is being collected.”