Apps — including travel — need to do lot more on privacy or more fines coming, FTC says
Skift Take
Travel apps -- a bunch of which focus on accessing user's geolocation and photos besides other private information on mobile -- need to get their act together after this FTC fine and guidelines.
Online companies may face action by Congress to toughen U.S. privacy standards if they don’t do a better job of protecting the privacy of mobile device users, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz said today.
If some companies “don’t wake up and do the right thing, my sense is that industry is far more likely to face much more prescriptive laws down the road,” Leibowitz, the outgoing FTC head, said on a conference call with reporters (PDF of his transcript). “I don’t think that’s going to be very far down the road because privacy is the quintessential bipartisan issue in Congress.”
The FTC today released a set of mobile-privacy recommendations for application stores, such as those run by Apple Inc. and Google Inc., app developers and online advertising networks. FTC staff “strongly encourages” companies to adopt the non-binding guidelines, the agency said in a news release. (Full PDF of mobile privacy recommendations from FTC embedded below)
Th
