On Tuesday, Canada’s privacy commissioner added his voice to a growing chorus asking mobile app stores to foreground how developers use data collected from customers.
Federal privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien was among 23 signatories to an open letter sent to seven app marketplaces, including Google Play and the Apple App Store. The letter urged merchants to make it mandatory for developers who sell apps in their stores to include links to their privacy policies.
“Links to privacy policies on the app marketplace appear to be optional but we think developers that collect personal information should be required to provide a link,” Therrien said in a release. “Without this information, it’s difficult for individuals to provide meaningful consent.”
A recent study by Therrien’s office found 85 per cent of mobile apps failed to adequately explain how they collect, use and share data collected from users.
“Developers are asking for information they have no real business accessing,” said Christopher Parsons, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. “If a flashlight app is asking to read your SMS messages, that’s a step too far.”
According to Parsons, many app developers participate in a “grey market” of personal information.
“The value is not in selling apps,” he said. “The value is in collecting information about individuals and then turning around and selling it to third parties.”
Requiring developers to include privacy plans alongside their apps “is a step in the right direction,” Parsons said, but many policies are written in “boilerplate legalese,” meaning even if they’re available, many consumers won’t be able to interpret them.
“What commissioners could do is say that if you’re going to develop a privacy policy… you should be providing a simple, accessible version of what you’re doing,” he said.
However, making privacy policies mandatory could allow agencies like the privacy commissioner’s office to better target companies who violate their own terms of service.
“What it means is that when and if a company says something in its privacy policy that’s not true, there’s an actionable legal case against them,” Parsons said.
A market incentive for privacy?
Around the world, there are increasing signs that users are willing to pay for privacy. In South Korea, for example, some 600,000 users fled the country’s most popular social media site, Kakao Talk, after the government announced plans to monitor the service, moving instead to a little-known German competitor called Telegraph.
“It forced a change in how the largest South Korean chat applications work. They’re trying to develop end-to-end encryption now because if they don’t do it, they’ll continue to see users leaving for foreign competitors,” Parsons said.
Source:: Metro News
