Are You Tracking Your Customers’ Whereabouts?

Every company has privacy policies in place and discloses to customers info about what personal information is captured, stored, and shared with others. Yet, the one area in which it’s easy to be in violation of your corporate privacy policy without being aware of it is in the mobile apps you deploy. That’s because the default for many mobile application development toolkits is to track users’ location and to send that information to a marketing database for analysis.

If you have mobile apps that need to know customers’ locations in order to provide them with useful functionality—like directions to your nearest store or ATM machine—you should check to make sure that no program or service is actually recording or storing the information about your customers’ whereabouts.

The mobile organization, CTIA, has put together a useful guide for mobile app developers that educates developers and provides good examples of best practices to follow.

Not Tracking Customers’ Locations Should Be the Default!

We need to take a stand against any person, service, or application that makes customers take an explicit action to avoid being tracked. We all should have the right to move about freely without anyone spying on us. Let’s ensure that the phones we use, the networks we use, the applications we use, the websites we build, and the mobile apps we develop do not monitor, track and store, information about our customers’ whereabouts!

Want to know more? Read this article: Are You Tracking Customers' Locations on Their Mobile Phones?