They're Lazy. Here's How to Fix Mobile Privacy

Beware the evil zombies! Location-based apps are grinding the bones of your privacy and sucking the marrow of your personal data! Certainly that’s what you might think if you’ve been following the flap about Girls Around Me. You know, the “creepy” stalker app for rapists in shopping malls?

This is all overstated, of course, but the hyperbole points to the very real vulnerabilities that some users feel about how much of their personal information they are transmitting in public and with what consequences. Some intrepid users, like our own Kashmir Hill, are more interested in how to transmit in public than in limiting their visibility. As Josh Constine wrote yesterday on TechCrunch, whipping up paranoia about privacy fears deters users from the actual, useful innovations that location-based apps can provide.

It’s beholden on the app maker to convince us of that utility, but, like it or not, some app you use on a daily basis has, or will soon have, a location-based execution. Facebook and Foursquare, sure, their public data was the basis of Girls Around Me. But they have been joined by AroundMe, Yelp, Banjo and a host of others.

The secret to the adoption of location-based or ubiquitous apps is what Scott Jenson has identified as the value vs. pain equation. Apps need to demonstrate their usefulness and minimize the pain, not only of using the app, but of worrying about it’s privacy implications.

We judge apps by the number of downloads and, eventually, by the number of active users. The more useful metric, perhaps, is the number of active users per download. That would tell us how well the app is communicating its value proposition and how positive that value/pain ratio turns out to be. Location-based apps are not really evil, for the most part, but in the attempt to be fast and painless they have been lazy about making sure users know what they are exposing and when. it’s just easier to expose everything, all the time, and not have to futz with different scenarios.

But what am I suggesting, that responsible app makers be penalized for being responsible to their users? No, of course not. I’ve talked to enough first-rate mobile developers to realize that speed is the lifeblood of mobile.

What I want to propose (and I realize this is a tall order comparable with my request to the digital universe for unstrippable content attribution tags) is a dead simple, device level function for managing private data on devices. In order not to put app makers at a disadvantage for incorporating this functionality into their app in a one-off way, what I imagine is a universal standard that would operate on all platforms and be interoperable with any app on those platforms.

The goal is for users to be aware and in control of their mobile data in real time. These setting should be able to be applied app-by-app or globally at any time. Think of something as simple as a traffic light.