June 29, 2011
Your Mobile Privacy Matters
“Privacy must come first in mobile…” This was the statement of a T-Mobile (News 
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“Eighty five percent of customers who have opted in to a program don’t want to get out…” as said by Michael Niemann, senior manager of mobile advertising with T-Mobile. “Privacy is the first quest of carriers…” said Michael Niemann, for carriers the issues is one of push vs. pull messaging and, “When you get into push messaging and privacy, no carrier wants to deal with that.”
With Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.) and Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) introducing the Location Privacy and Protection Act, this issue is relevant now more than ever. The summary of the bill’s intent is marketers would have to get permission from mobile users before sharing location data with third parties if the bill introduced became law. Marketers would have to make their data collection activities transparent but wouldn’t be prohibited from engaging in data collection.
“The most crucial thing for marketers is always going to be consent and transparency,” said Jason Koslofsky, an attorney with legal firm ArentFox LLP, Washington, DC. Regardless of the bill or any laws that pass, mobile marketers should always make it very clear what the user is opting into.”
So, is this bill a bad idea? Possibly, I mean the last thing anyone wants is more government regulation, right? Are these discussions and panels and forums fuel for outrage or the grim outlook of mobile engagement coming to a slow painful end? No, this is should be viewed as a proactive effort on behalf of the mobile community for self-regulation.
The community should embrace this, mobile privacy, with ripe opportunity. You should begin now, to build your strategy to incorporate it, then make sure you stick to it and let your engaged audience know that what you value more than anything is their Privacy. Let’s show the world we can do it.
GroupM is helping with items just like that. They have developed new guidelines for safeguarding the privacy of consumers using mobile devices. GroupM is pioneering the effort to introduce a high level of privacy standards to mobile communications.
The guidelines GroupM is developing are designed to limit the amount of data collected and passed from mobile devices that can be used in marketing campaigns. This is to protect consumers from the unwanted collection and distribution of their personal information.
As an industry, those who wish to engage mobile end users need to be aggressive in establishing guidelines that are fair to the mobile end users and stick to those policies.
There are 5.3 billion mobile subscribers globally, or 77 percent of the world population, and with an expected $20.6 billion in mobile money (marketing, ads, messaging, data, interactivity, etc.) by 2015, this industry is not going anywhere but up. Do your part and help make sure it stays fun and profitable for everybody.
Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2011, taking place Sept. 13-15, 2011, in Austin, Texas. ITEXPO (News - Alert) (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. To register, click here.
David Vaughan is Director of Projects at TSG Global. His expertise is in educating businesses on how, by leveraging SMS-enabled long codes, they can engage their customer bases at a new level without the restrictions of short code. To read more of David's articles, please visit his
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