Avenue A places paramount
importance on user privacy issues.
Foremost, privacy is a basic human right and is recognized as a
necessity by the EU and the OECD (Principles of Fair Information
Practice). Furthermore, privacy is
good business, and will be required for mobile commerce to gain extensive
adoption by consumers around the world.
The online advertising
industry has been fortunate that wired Internet privacy issues have been
raised and addressed. This year the
Industry wide understanding of privacy-best-practices has increased
dramatically. The industry’s
collective newfound understanding will help us build the wireless mobile
commerce market in a proper manner.
The following is a list
of requirements that need to be addressed in order to meet the needs of both
the consumer and the business:
· Gateway servers must not
automatically pass contactable data such as Subscriber ID to web
servers.
· The industry needs to
establish the roles of gateways, portals and network operators in privacy
protection processes.
· With wireless service
that is not subsidized by location targeted marketing
o All location targeting
marketing must be on an “opt in“ basis.
o Users must be able to
completely turn off the sharing of their location data.
o Users must be able to
disclose their location at their preferred level of granularity (e.g. state,
city, or street level).
o Users should be able to
select what data collection practices are acceptable to them via a wireless
version of P3P.
o A user’s privacy
preferences must be easily imported and exported across
devices.
o A user should be able to
easily opt in and request targeted services.
· Users should have access
to
o Free wireless service
plans where location based targeted marketing is activated with service sign
up.
o Reduced cost wireless
service plans where anonymous profile targeted marketing is activated with
service sign up and they opt-in to location based
targeting.
o Full cost wireless
service plans where they opt-in to all targeting
services.