In June of this year, Senator Al Franken (D. Minn.) introduced the “Location Privacy Protection Act of 2011” (S. 1223). According to the bill summary available on Franken’s website, a 2010 investigation by the Wall Street Journal revealed that 47 of the top 101 mobile applications for Apple iPhones and Google Android phones disclose user location without consent of the user.
According to Franken’s bill summary, current law prevents disclosure of user location during telephone calls without user consent. Currently, no similar legislation protects user location when a user accesses information through a mobile web browser or mobile application. Franken claims that his bill will close loopholes in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act that allow for this distinction.
If S. 1223 passes, companies will be required to obtain permission not only to collect mobile user location information but also to share that information with third parties. Additionally, the bill seeks to put in place measures to prevent stalking through location information.
As of this writing, Franken’s bill has been assigned to the Senate Judiciary Committee and is being cosponsored by Sens. Blumenthal, Coons, Durbin, Menendez, and Sanders.
Original Post (published 9/8/2011)
When was the last time you read a license agreement after installing software or downloading an app on your smartphone? If you’re like most people, the answer is probably never.
According to some estimates, fewer than 8 percent of us actually read the entirety of those agreements, despite rising concerns about digital privacy and data collection. This past June, for example, Sens. Al Franken (D-Minn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) introduced legislation entitled the Location Privacy Protection Act of 2011, which, if enacted, would require mobile device users to consent before application providers and other companies could obtain location information of those users.
As users are becoming more concerned about digital privacy but less likely to read the legal agreements touching on their privacy, private companies are finding new ways to approach this digital divide.
The New York Times reported earlier this month on PrivacyChoice, a company that aims to do just that. One way it is doing this is its Mobile Policymaker, a feature that allows developers (in PrivacyChoice’s words) to “build a better policy in less than ten minutes,” reducing license agreements and privacy policies into bite-sized, digestible sentences, and forever replacing the multi-page, small-font, legal-intensive agreement.
PrivacyChoice charges a $40 annual subscription fee for its Mobile Policymaker, but the company is currently offering the service for free as a promotion for early adopters.
According to its website, PrivacyChoice also offers tools for web users. For no charge, you can find out which companies are collecting your information, see how those companies target ads based on online content you consume, opt-out of ad targeting and more.
All of this begs the question of what purpose legal agreements and policies have where the terms are the mobile app industry’s equivalent to insurance boilerplate. Imcomprehensibility may be a lesser evil than the problem known in contract law as “adhesion”. Transparency is nice, but contracts that are nonnegotiable, waive many common consumer rights and grant users the limited recourse of legal action in far-away places do little to reflect privacy principles of user “choice”, short of simply not using the application or service.
And that becomes a true “choice” when the marketplace offers competitive options not only on products but also on rights such as privacy protection.
Kate Tummarello is a Research and Social Media Intern with Mirsky & Company and a reporter at Roll Call/Congressional Quarterly. Follow Kate on Twitter @ktummarello. Andrew Mirsky of Mirsky & Company contributed to this post.
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