I Always Feel like, Somebody’s Watching Meeeee…

Apple has been getting a lot of press lately regarding its mobile advertising practices and policies. Today was no different with The Wall Street Journal’s Jennifer Valentino-DeVries reporting on Apple changing its privacy policy to collect location data:

As it rolls out a new iPhone operating system and an advertising platform, Apple is changing its privacy policy to allow collection and sharing of “precise location data,” including “real-time geographic location” of devices.

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Many analysts view location targeting as a possible boon for the mobile-advertising industry, allowing businesses to direct ads to people who are within a certain distance of a store or who frequent a particular area. It could open mobile advertising to smaller local businesses and make ads more valuable — important developments for Apple as it gets into the advertising game with iAd.

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But location is a category particularly fraught with pitfalls when it comes to privacy. More than data on Web-browsing habits or social networks, this location information is tied to a user physically. And increasingly, mobile devices have the ability to gather location data continuously, even if the user isn’t in an application that obviously uses it. With Apple’s new iPhone operating system, for example, applications can track location even after a user has left the program.

Apple is aware of the concerns. When it announced its new operating system and iAd, executives were quick to point out that the company takes privacy seriously and has added new privacy controls for users. (The folks at PCWorld have some good images of what iPhone users can expect to see with these controls.) To collect location data, an application must first get the user’s permission. Users in earlier iPhone operating systems could turn off location services completely on the location-services control panel, and now they can turn them off for certain applications as well. And when an application is collecting location information, a little arrow now appears telling users they’re being tracked.

It will be very important for Apple to stay vocal and open about this subject. Location-based services and advertising will be tremendous, especially for smaller, local establishments such as restaurants, as the charts in this link indicate. Because the iPhone plays such a key role in attracting users to try new services, the last thing the industry would want is for consumers to run the other way due to privacy concerns.