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StacyAdelmanFirstPaper 3 - 28 Apr 2013 - Main.StacyAdelman
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| META TOPICPARENT | name="WebPreferences" |
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Let's Give Them Something to Talk About: Mobile Devices and the Privacy Policy Distraction | | | Introduction | |
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< | "The Tale of the Vacant Lot? " is a story about a young girl, driven by capitalist signifiers of success and self-worth, who buys every product she desires and imagines will improve her life. Unwilling to part with money or any of her other physical possessions, the girl agrees to a trade. The shopkeeper offers to take only "something that has no value to her." When the girl questions what that might be, the shopkeeper replies: "Should it matter?" The twist of course is that the shopkeeper slowly steals pieces of her life. We trade pieces of our lives (in a less metaphysical sense) for free browsing, free email, and a multitude of other online services, but many if not most of us have no idea exactly what it is that we are giving up and to what end. Privacy policies are designed to itemize that bill. | >
> | "The Tale of the Vacant Lot" is a story about a young girl, driven by capitalist signifiers of success and self-worth, who buys every product she desires and imagines will improve her life. Unwilling to part with money or any of her other physical possessions, the girl agrees to a trade. The shopkeeper offers to take only "something that has no value to her." When the girl questions what that might be, the shopkeeper replies: "Should it matter?" The twist of course is that the shopkeeper slowly steals pieces of her life. We trade pieces of our lives (in a less metaphysical sense) for free browsing, free email, and a multitude of other online services, but many if not most of us have no idea exactly what it is that we are giving up and to what end. Privacy policies are designed to itemize that bill. | | | Such transparency has become imperative in a world where transactions, both personal and professional, are conducted increasingly on mobile phones, but as it stands, less than one third of Americans feel they are in control of their personal information on their mobile devices. Many apps routinely gather information from the personal address books of unwitting users and store such information on their servers, with one leading app executive calling it "industry best practice." By June of 2012, California Attorney General Kamala Harris had reached an agreement with Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, and Research in Motion that they would require mobile applications ("apps") on their platforms to conspicuously post a privacy policy detailing the information they collect, how they use it, and with whom it is shared. Users would be able to review these policies before they download a given app, and platforms must offer a mechanism to report non-compliant apps. While in some sense this seems to indicate positive momentum with respect to users' privacy, the agreement also serves to further obfuscate the boundaries of privacy rights. |
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