Smart phones, those of us who have them couldn't do without them and those who don't have one probably yearn after one. The rise of smart phones has been meteoric and with new pricing structures in place it is now possible to have a smart phone at a very reasonable price. According to Gartner, smart phones made up 19% of the 1.6 billion units sold in 2010, a 72.1% increase on 2009. There is no doubting the success and dominance of the smart phone in today’s market but we have to ask ourselves, what are the risks?
In the last month we have seen a number of news articles discussing the ulterior motives that some companies may have when it comes sensitive information and your smart phone. Most recently we have seen Apple come under some scrutiny for accusations that have been tracking their iPhone user without their knowledge. Apple's approach to ethics and privacy has been criticised in the past and this latest revelation will do them no favours with the launch of the latest iPhone coming later this year. Location services are however one of the main sales points of any smartphone. Built in GPS and maps applications allow us to find our way around and locate our nearest coffee shop or pharmacist. Many new social networking apps such as Foursquare and Facebook places rely on this to exist, so why is it that only now people are realising the tracking possibilities of phones? Just because you can look up your location to the nearest 20 metres or so doesn't mean that you are the only person that can do this, maybe you should be but in the grand scheme of things this is never going to be case. With the marketing power of Google these days information like that is invaluable.
Apple are not an isolated case though, Pandora's free radio services app has been pulled up in recent weeks for using code that harvests and transmits mass quantities of data. The application in question has the power to collate information such as GPS location, device identifiers, gender, and even user age without proper notice or authorization from the end user (Shields, T). In many ways this is an even worse breech of privacy than Apple's tracking habits. With the information stated the concern is that Pandora can sell this information, and has done so already, to large advertising libraries such as AdMarvel, AdMob and Google.Ads. Individually these pieces of information may be worth relatively little, but when compiled into a single unifying picture, it can provide significant insight into a person’s life. Supposing this information was sold to an Ad library in one nice neat folder, you could then be accurately targeted with products and services appropriate to you. They could build a picture of your life, know where you live and work, where your partner lives and the sort of income you have. All of the of course makes for the perfect customer profile form the advertisers point of view but at what cost?
The deception and cunning of large corporations never fails to amaze me. Looking back across my application usage, I am sure my personal information must be in the possession of all sorts of Ad libraries but at the same time I can’t help but have a strange admiration for however thought of gaining this information in this way. Don’t get me wrong, I think it is a disgrace, a breach of personal privacy and entirely unethical, it should be stopped or at least policed.
The worse part about all of this is that it only fueling the fire of those people who really believe that George Orwell’s 1984 may be a reality. I must admit that all of this does point to a “Big Brother” society but then again doesn’t all social networking do that in some way? Digital privacy and ethics are something that many of us take for granted, some don’t think about them at all it would seem until they have been violated in some way personally. From a business perspective there will surely be an ongoing struggling between what is right and what pays, the shame being that the two rarely go hand in hand and the online community is so vast that it is nearly impossible to regulate in practically. The two examples discussed above, highlight the shortcomings of those companies in their ethical behavior. We can only hope that they act as cautionary tales for other companies and are not repeated by others. That said, I am a realist and therefore realize that that is probably a long way off.
References:
Shields, T., 2011. Mobile Apps Invading Your Privacy. Veracode. Available from: http://www.veracode.com/blog/2011/04/mobile-apps-invading-your-privacy/ [Accessed 25/4/2011].
Further reading:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/22/apple_iphone_location_tracking_analysis/page2.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/06/pandora_smartphone_privacy/
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