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Published: July 2012

Survey reveals the dramatic increase in privacy policies for mobile apps

Washington, D.C.-based think tank Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) has released a survey that shows a huge increase in the number of mobile applications with privacy policies. FPF, along with the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), has also released a report offering mobile application developers a list of privacy best practices.

In the survey, FPF looked at the whether the most popular paid and free apps had privacy policies and found a dramatic increase in the number of apps with policies detailing their collection and use of customer data. According to FPF, the percentage of free apps with a privacy policy doubled on the iOS App Store platform, from 40% to 84%; the percentage of paid apps with privacy policies on the same platform increased by 4%, from 60% to 64%. On the Google Play platform, the percentage of free apps with a privacy policy started remarkably high at 70%, and increased to 76%. The percentage of paid apps increased as well, from 30% to 48%.

FPF and CDT also unveiled a report, entitled Best Practices for Mobile Application Developers, which provides guidance on protecting user privacy to the hundreds of thousands of mobile application developers currently deployed on smart phones. Among other recommendations, the report suggests that developers embed privacy into the design of their applications, make privacy policies easy to understand and accessible, and offer users choice and control over how their data is collected and used.

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Future of Privacy Forum

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Consumer Protection   ♦   Privacy/Rights   ♦