SmartPhone Privacy – are you ready?
Posted: January 20, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »SmartPhone Privacy
Facebook was the most visited site in the US in 2010. Social is clearly big. Or does that just mean we just have an easy way of keeping in touch and communicating with each other? The old adage that consumers drive technology adoption holds true once again. If you look at any successful business, inevitably that company has provided a product or service that fills a need.
With so many people spending an inordinate amount of time (40 million minutes a month) on Facebook, they are starting to actually make some money on advertising. Nothing to justify their silly multiples, but $2b a year isn’t too shabby.
Spending all this time online does mean that scrutiny of our behavior is also on the rise. With so much of our behavior now recordable – especially via Smartphones – we are starting to see a mixed response to tracking. People like relevance but are worried about privacy.
Cookies have been around for ages but advertisers are working with networks to use them more aggressively. Having the products you looked at re-served in ads on other sites is not terribly annoying and only mildly creepy. The FTC has proposed a “do not track option” to block tracking cookies. But clearly getting served relevant ads is way less intrusive than a cold call.
A little more interesting is the debate over the use of a mobile device’s unique identifier (UDID) by third-parties. App makers in co-operation with companies like Flurry get free data on how their app is being used. That is fairly acceptable but Ad Networks are beginning to use this number to build a profile of the phone user for targeted advertising. And you can’t clear the UDID.
But is having your age, gender, UDID and the location of your device available to third parties really a huge issue? If companies find ways of providing a service useful to consumers then we shouldn’t have problems. However, in general, paid advertising tends to drive most of the business models for this kind of data aggregation so I’m not hopeful that we will get much more than slightly relevant ads. If that turns out to be the case then we will definitely see increased Smartphone privacy activism.
