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Regulators Sniffing Around Mobile Privacy Issues

18.05.12

Regulators have made some inquiries at Microsoft about the role the company plays in monitoring privacy policies of apps on Windows Phones, said Mary Newcomer Williams, the Microsoft attorney. "Suddenly, they're realizing this is something they should be concerned about but they're not sure how to tackle it," she said. "Regulators are interested in looking to platform providers to play an enforcement role in this space." That's because there are so many mobile applications that it would be a major undertaking for regulators to oversee all of them.

But Microsoft doesn't particularly want to play that role, she said. "On the platform provider side, we aren't really equipped to do that kind of enforcement either," she said. "We enable the download of a file to the phone. We don't know where it connects to and what data might come off the phone. So the idea that we might enforce a privacy policy that gets the right kind of consent, it's hard to imagine how you can do it."

She suggests that the best solution might be for a third-party organization to educate application developers on proper privacy practices and possibly run a certification program to demonstrate that apps comply with set requirements.

Source: PCWorld