Privacy Experts: Consumer Trust Is Vital for Mobile Payments and Apps
Paul Westrick puts his personal touch on each wallet he carefully handcrafts from luscious Italian leather. His micro-wallets, smaller than a deck of cards, are neatly displayed in a hip, hyperlocal workshop “Zeroz” that would seem more at home in SoHo than downtown Columbus, Ohio. He personally shows and sells his wallets to each customer, completing each transaction seamlessly with nothing more than his Square card reader and his iPhone.
Westrick says that the simplicity and convenience of mobile payments helps to build trusting relationships with customers: “It’s way more convenient. Our style is more personal and approachable and we don’t need to run off to a cash register,” Westrick told Street Fight in a recent interview.
Building relationships with consumers is all about trust — and trust is exactly what consumers lack when it comes to most mobile transactions. New statistics show that 41% of consumers do not trust businesses with their personal information. Another survey from U.C. Berkeley reveals that 96% of consumers do not want to disclose their locations to retailers while shopping. Exacerbating the mistrust are accusations that businesses have been collecting users’ email addresses, locations and their address books without telling the consumer or getting permission. Bloomberg reported on May 5, 2012 that Google may be negotiating the terms of a fine it may pay the Federal Trade Commission after accusations were made that Google found a way to modify the security features on an iPhone’s Safari browser to track users.
On April 23, 2012, the Center for Democracy and Technology warned that mobile payment methods are capable of collecting more information than standard retail cash registers. Mobile payment methods can collect telephone numbers, email addresses and mailing addresses. “Without strong user privacy controls, mobile payments may turn your cell phone into a magnet for telemarketing, spam, and online behavioral advertising,” Harley Geiger posted on a CDT blog. Several days later, the Federal Trade Commission held a workshop in Washington to explore privacy issues with mobile payment methods, prompting a plea from the National Retailers Association urging the FTC to “move cautiously” in establishing regulations for mobile payments. “The government should not impose regulations that would forestall yet-to-be-imagined advances and innovation in order to avoid potential ‘harm’ based largely on speculation,” NRF senior VP and general counsel Mallory Duncan said.
Gary Schwartz, president and CEO of Impact Mobile and chair of the North American Chapter of the Mobile Entertainment Forum, tells Street Fight that building trust should be the core of a retailer’s mobile and online strategy. “The key to engaging with the consumer in a trusted relationship in a retail environment is you don’t want to engage with people who don’t want to engage with you,” says Schwartz. “The outreach should be focused on loyalists with a retailer’s brand. It’s about your loyalists putting up their hand and saying ‘hey I want to talk to you because I love your product.'”
“You need to make a call to action on all your touch points, and say if you love my product opt in. Once you have that, you have to let them opt out at any time,” Schwartz adds. He believes the strategy can be outrageously successful: “If you’re on target, if you are talking to them and they love your product, they will stay with you. It will attract 10x over your email channel.”
Building trust requires developers and businesses to implement a strategy that give consumers a better idea of what information is collected from them, and what choices they have to control it. Regulators have encouraged developers and businesses to engage in “privacy by design,” that is, incorporate transparency and protections for consumers on their information as products are built and launched.
Regulators have become increasingly aggressive in addressing what they perceive as abuses in the use of consumer information from mobile devices. Already, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Research in Motion and other major application stores have agreed with the California Attorney General to require all developers to provide privacy policies with their applications, include a process to display such policies in their stores, and report developers that are not complying. The California Attorney General’s office warned it will take enforcement action if the privacy policy process is not in place within six months.
The Federal Trade Commission will hold a workshop on May 30, 2012 regarding consumer privacy online and on mobile devices. The FTC is pushing for a uniform “do not track” process for online and mobile behavior advertising.
Some major developers are sharing ideas to improve providing consumers with transparency and control. Mozilla requires that all applications offered for its Firefox browsers must have privacy policies. At a recent privacy conference, representatives from Microsoft and Mozilla suggested the use of a uniform set of icons that would show in a simple and graphic way what information an application may be collecting, how it will be used, and how a user can control it. The developers believe such icons can convey information clearly on smaller mobile screens compared to lengthy privacy policies presented by text. This year likely will be a turning point on whether businesses and developers can implement a uniform privacy scheme for mobile apps and mobile payment systems or face more legislation and regulation.
Brian Dengler is an attorney with Vorys Legal Counsel and journalist who covers legal issues in eMedia. He is a former vice-president of AOL, Inc., a former newspaperman, and an EMMY-winning TV journalist. He teaches new media issues as an adjunct at Kent State University and formerly at Otterbein University.
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