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.

Olympics: Mobile Comes in Last Place with NBC

It always amazes me how large broadcasters and other media outlets will complain that ad and other profit sources are down, but then they don’t embrace new, proven revenue streams. This came through loud and clear with NBC’s coverage of the Olympics in Vancouver. As reported by Reuters:

NBC, which paid a record $2.2 billion for U.S. broadcast rights to the Beijing and Vancouver Olympics, has said it will lose money on the winter Games.

NBC said on Tuesday that half of all Americans had watched at least some of its Olympic coverage.

But NBC online coverage of the Vancouver Winter Olympics drew just 33 million viewers. Alan Wurtzel, president of research at NBC Universal, said TV was “still king.”

“Multiplatform consumption is emerging and going to become extraordinarily important. But the mothership is — and will remain for a very long time — television,” he said.

Emerging? It’s already here and important! Timo Lumme, head of TV and marketing for the International Olympic Committee weighs in:

“…non-traditional media” had already matched the 20,000 hours from traditional broadcasters so far these Games, in Reuters’ words, “contributing to a total audience he expects to reach 3.5 billion — or half the world’s population.”

Lumme told a news conference that “we now have the same amount of hours covered globally on digital media — Internet, mobile — as we have on the old media broadcasting, and a quarter of that is mobile.”

The message couldn’t be any more obvious: mobile is here and traditional media giants needs to get onboard or risk further obsolescence when it comes to attracting both advertisers and consumers. NBC did offer a great iPhone app for the Olympicas which I used, but there was so much more they could have done. I hope they’ll look to integrate more mobile initiatives in future large-scale events.