Mobile consumers want privacy- report summary from MEF

Andrew Bud, global chairman of MEF, posted an article on VentureBeat to discuss the survey report of mobile consumer attitudes towards app privacy by MEF (global community for mobile content & commerce).

This survey was far reaching with over 9,500 respondents across ten countries. In the report summary, it analyzes privacy in the context of four component parts:

• Transparency: Consumers understand the impact of mobile apps on their privacy and want app providers to explain what and how their data is collected and used;
• Comfort:Only a third (37%) of consumers are comfortable sharing personal information with an app;
• Security: Most mobile users trust app providers to protect their personal information;
• Control: A third of consumers think they have complete control over how their personal information is used for advertising purposes. However, in reality it is unlikely consumers are able to control the way companies use their personal information.

These statistics are very useful evidences that users need make sense and have control of their personal data exchanged with online platforms. And the report mentions that in reality consumers need to face the limitation of privacy control. Therefore, this project needs to explore what the new service can do to help users gain more control under the limited situation.

How advertisers track you and what information they collect (infographic)- VentureBeat

While talking with people these two days, most of them mentioned the importance of privacy and several said they are suffering ad invasions such as unable-cancelled ad emails which they don’t want to read any more.

Here is an article about how advertisers track and collect information of you. It shows an infographic of advertisers’ tracking and the process looks quite scary and out of user’s control. It offers some options to stop tracking, but for me even though I know the problem the solution does not look good to practice. Maybe because too technical things are difficult for me to understand. We actually have a Chinese browser(360) who says will protect users from all these cookie problems but still the debate of whether it really protect users or steal their private data in fact never stops. For users the big problem may be how to choose the real useful tool instead of protecting themselves from attacking. And as some other insight, maybe make use of cookies to track users for their own purposes is something else technology could do for user’s benefit.