RE: Privacy Design Guidelines by GSMA

If I may contribute here, since Vodafone was one of the leaders of the GSMA's Mobile Privacy Initiative . . . (thanks, Karl, for the plug).

The MPI is intended to be a cross-industry initiative, and we've spent the last couple of years working with other players, including integral participation from app developers, to create and then gather support for these guidelines. It was very important that we as carriers take action here, since we're increasingly being held accountable, by our customers and our regulators, for the applications and services that our services and devices make available (especially those of us in the EU, given that we are most likely to be the participant in the mobile app ecosystem over which regulators have jurisdiction). 

If you take a look at the guidelines, they are very much not "don't collect personal data" - in fact, it's in no one's interest for that to be the position carriers take (our customers certainly wouldn't thank us for it). But they are intended to strike a balance between the interests of all participants  to have a vibrant and commercially viable app market, and the best interests of our customers to be confident that they can participate in this market without concerns for their privacy. 

That said, if there's something there that you have any questions or concerns about, please do get in touch. I'd welcome any feedback you can provide that can help us continue to develop and evolve these guidelines.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Barnes [mailto:richard.barnes@gmail.com] 
Sent: 26 March 2012 10:11
To: Karl Dubost
Cc: public-privacy (W3C mailing list)
Subject: Re: Privacy Design Guidelines by GSMA

I'm a little puzzled here.  GSMA is an carrier association, not an app developer association.  (And those are *very* *different*
communities.)  Did anyone actually talk to app developers about this?

On skimming, the content looks pretty non-controversial (at least for this crowd), but I have serious doubts about a carrier-generated document getting implemented by developers.  For example, the carriers might be happy to say "don't collect personal information", since their revenue streams don't depend on it; empirically, app developers have a very different opinion.

--Richard




On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 11:03 AM, Karl Dubost <karld@opera.com> wrote:
> The GSMA organization has published guidelines for people creating mobile applications.
> There is at the beginning some definitions about the terms in the guidelines.
>
>    Privacy: Privacy is a dynamic concept that can mean different 
> things
>    to different people. For the purposes of these guidelines, privacy
>    is defined as the ability of individuals to know how their personal
>    information will be collected, shared and used, and to exercise
>    choice and control over its use.
>    - 
> http://www.gsma.com/documents/privacy-design-guidelines-for-mobile-app
> lication-development/20008
>
> Then follow a list of principles with for each of them
>
> * Guideline
> * Implementation
> * Use Case and Examples
>
> There is also a website http://www.gsma.com/mobile-and-privacy/
>
>
> --
> Karl Dubost - http://dev.opera.com/
> Developer Relations, Opera Software
>
>

Received on Monday, 26 March 2012 09:23:31 UTC