FTC Concentrating This Year on Mobile Apps Privacy, Especially for Children, Says Official
The FTC will bear down during the next six months on privacy disclosures for mobile applications, particularly for child users, an official said Thursday. Commission aides will study how companies have responded to a critical survey called “Mobile Apps for Kids,” released in February, and decide whether violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act have been committed, said Patricia Poss, the chief of the Consumer Protection Bureau’s Mobile Technology Unit.
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A May 30 FTC workshop in Washington on digital advertising disclosures, to be webcast, will include a panel on effective mobile notices, Poss said in an online Practising Law Institute seminar. The event is connected with the commission’s update of its 12-year-old document “Dot Com Disclosures,” she said. A mobile-payments workshop April 26 in D.C., also to be streamed, will have a panel about handling privacy considerations, Poss said.
There’s discussion that mobile should have on one of the codes of conduct envisioned in a White House data privacy framework put out in February, said Francoise Gilbert of the IT Law Group. And state as well as FTC enforcement of mobile privacy can be expected after a February settlement under California’s Online Privacy Protection Act between the state attorney general and Amazon, Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Research In Motion, she said.
The mobile-apps market still “looks like the wild West” when it comes to truly informing users what information is collected and who uses it for what purposes, Gilbert said. “It is difficult for the user to control all this information,” particularly in relation to business partners of carriers and app developers that consumers may well not even know are involved, let alone have any direct dealings with, said Chris Conley, a technology and civil liberties fellow at the ACLU of Northern California. “The mobile-data ecosystem exacerbates all” the privacy risks inherent in digital communications, he said: “user surprise,” security breaches and data requests by the government and others.