With all the litigation going on involving the smartphone industry, something good might have come from one Courtroom. The California Attorney General has struck a deal with Microsoft, Apple, Google, HP, RIM and Amazon that will have new privacy policies put in place.
In a nutshell the agreement will:
As far as enforcement is concerned, violators can be prosecuted under California's Unfair Competition and False Advertising laws. Not sure how far of a reach such enforcement will have but it's a start.
Source: California Attorney General Via: Engadget
Comments
This is excellent; a reporting channel -and- a requirement to have a viewable privacy policy prior to download.
About time!
Great news for not being exploited.... Its awesome
Expect a flood of devs on AppHub asking "How do I write a policy privacy"?
There goes 75% of their apps. Ha!
No, they will ask:
Where can I copy a privacy policy from?
This is great.
That's great news!!!
But I miss something:
A declaration what the relevant APIs are used for (eg location services, data services) and how that data is stored (gps data - transmitted or just locally stored on the phone)
This would require an update on the phone side, am I right?
This will maybe clean up the marketplace from fraud apps. :)
so do you have to have that privacy policy displayed even if your app doesn't use network?
Regardless of what you have to do, you'd be wise to have a privacy policy.
The Marketplace submission includes a step where a tool shows you all permissions your app or game really needs. Unfortunately, most developers seem to have missed that part, resulting in their apps having the 4 default permissions.
We paid attention, cut it back to 1 permission, and explain why we need it. That was a couple of days before the sh*t hit the fan. Just check the Marketplace for "Arachna".
We're from Germany, and privacy has always been a major concern here. So we can now lean back, while others are busy updating their apps, clogging the submission queue for weeks.