A lot of people predicted that 2012 would be a great year for privacy, but not a lot being done for national laws. Today, Congressmen Ed Markey has decided to go forth with drafting a mobile privacy bill that would help to provide disclosure of what mobile usage is being collected/used and receive consent before anything is tracked. This topic was brought to great national attention with the CarrierIQ fiasco last year. While this is not anywhere near being passed, it is a great start to see more attention being brought to online privacy especially around mobile as it picks up so much traction.
“Consumers have the right to know and to say no to the presence of software on their mobile devices that can collect and transmit their personal and sensitive information,”
Congressman Markey is introducing the Mobile Device Privacy Act would cover a lot of key hotspots for disclosing information to the consumer, which includes any monitoring software that comes preinstalled on the phone, any software that is added by the carrier at a later time, or any monitoring software that gets bundled with an app being downloaded. Beyond just disclosing that they are tracking you, this act will also require software to display the data being collected, who is receiving the data (first and third parties), and require a policy to be displayed for all parties receiving data.
With the cause for explicit consent to allow tracking on new apps or even whole devices, this could become an overload for the end user seeing so many notifications for accepting policies and practices. I could easily see this turning into something where at first people actually read and see what data is being used, but eventually they just continue to click “I accept” as usual online. This is however a great step forward and we are expecting to see several iterations of this bill (which I will keep you updated on) before anything final happens.
NOTE: Congressmen Markey is also the congressmen that opened up an FTC investigation into CarrierIQ last year, which shows his commitment and background into this area.
The full draft is available for your reading pleasures here.