I came across this article yesterday regarding privacy
violation and since we talked about privacy and data protection in a recent
lecture, I thought this might be a good first topic to blog about.
Hipster and Path are the two Apple apps that by “mistake”
uploaded a user’s address book information with all their contacts without any
explicit permission. Of course, both of the companies apologized publicly for
the inconvenience caused. But I wonder if this is enough. Considering that they
violated so many people’s privacy, how can it be so easy to undo this kind of
action? I mean, is it good enough to have a decent PR agent that will publish
an official apology in the newspaper and on a blog to make things right again? Hipster
apparently hosted a summit to discuss best practices and privacy standards as a
way to straighten out their error. Also it was promised that all the uploaded
private data was deleted immediately as they came to be aware of the problem.
It seems like in most cases the only compensation user’s get
is a simple apology but should we really let them get away so easily? There is
a bunch of privacy laws that “supposedly” protect a consumer but are they used
effectively?
I believe that almost non of the users that experienced the
privacy invasion by either of the two software applications actually raise
their voice to complain about it in a legal form.
This brings me to the point that WE users need to care more
about our own privacy in order to make companies/organizations be more careful
when it comes down to protecting it.
If anyone is interested in the article itself, here is the
link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16962129
If a simple apology is not acceptable what kind of compensation do you feel the users deserve?
ReplyDeleteI think these are isolated cases; the developers of the app's must have made a mistake and in the end, there is no way to take back a mistake - an apology is all that could have been given.
ReplyDeleteAlso users are explicitly told before downloading any app that the app accesses features from the phone, and if they were not comfortable with that, they should have not downloaded it.
The problem is not this app in particular. What I intended to illustrate by pointing out this specific case was the irreversibility of a mistake. Indeed, I agree in this particular situation the best thing the provider can do is apologise and fix the bug. But I was thinking about some major mistake that might happen one day due to the irresponsible and insensitive handling of our data.
ReplyDeleteAnd like you said : there is no way to take back a mistake!