Tag: mobile security

The think tank has raised considerable concerns regarding consumer safety and security.

In 2012, a geolocation privacy bill by Senator Al Franken (D-Minnesota) was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee, in order to provide the users of smartphones with a greater degree of control over the way that their data is controlled.

However, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation feels this legislation is problematic.

The law that was proposed would make it necessary for app developers to require users to specifically opt in to programs that would allow for the collection or disclosure of geolocation data. It would no longer be permitted for apps to automatically select that option, so that users would need to actively opt out if they did not wish to share their information in that way.

The geolocation data was not being protected by the companies that collected it, said Franken.

According to the senator, the “Companies that collect our location information are not protecting it the way they should.” At that time, he made reference to a number of errors and blunders regarding privacy, which had drawn considerable media attention. This included reports that Android and iPhone devices were sending the geolocation data of their users to Google and Apple.

Not to mention the CarrierIQ fiasco. That company was a part of a high profile discovery in 2011, when the researcher demonstrated that its software was capable of logging the keystrokes that were made on smartphones.

While it is Franken’s intention to reintroduce the geolocation privacy bill in 2013, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a think tank, is openly arguing that this proposed law may not encourage positive changes. In fact, it called the legislation “particularly problematic for apps that are supported by location-based advertising.”

It explained that the bill, which was designed to protect a user’s privacy in the face of geolocation technology and use, would require a user to have to give consent every time the app intends to work with a new ad network. This, they say, would generate awkward consumer notices. The think tank’s behaviors in the past have not indicated that they are adverse to advertising techniques such as pop-ups, which they recently used to state that they were rejecting do-not-track requests.

The results of a recent poll have shown that those who use mobile most aren’t shopping with their devices.

Over the last few weeks, m-commerce security has been seeing a great deal of attention, but despite the tremendous changes that have been made in order to ensure that data remains protected when shoppers are making their purchases, consumers in Europe are still not considering their smartphones and tablets to be the ideal methods to use when they shop.

This recent survey was conducted in order to better understand European consumers and their mobile behaviors.

The company behind the poll was TechWeekEurope. It reached out to its readership in order to obtain their feedback in a number of different areas of m-commerce and to describe their opinions and behaviors over the most recent holiday shopping season. It aimed at understanding not only mobile behaviors, but those in the overall e-commerce sphere.

The m-commerce survey was performed following the very end of the Christmas shopping hype.

What it discovered was that a mere 10 percent of the respondents had used a smartphone or tablet for making the majority of their holiday purchases. In fact, m-commerce was ranked in fifth place when compared with the popularity of other channels where purchases can be made.

The most popular channel was the online shopping category, in which 43.8 percent of the respondents made the majority of their holiday purchases over their laptops or desktop PCs. On the other hand 25.6 percent of the participants in the survey said that they went to brick and mortar retail shops in order to make their Christmas shopping purchases. These were many times greater than the participation in m-commerce as a primary shopping method.

The m-commerce poll went on to discover that although the participants were from a highly tech-savvy demographic that was likely to use its smartphones and tablets comfortably and for a number of different purchases, they were not enchanted with shopping directly through their devices. This was unexpected, as it had been anticipated that those who use the devices most would be those most likely to shop with them.