Mobile App Privacy: Value Must Be Greater Than Risk
In the mobile ecosystem, we are moving towards an era of contextual awareness. Contextual awareness is a set of technologies that link changes in a user's environment with an app, enabling our smartphones to communicate relevant information to us before we even ask for it. Apps achieve context by having access to information about our environment (i.e. our location, the speed we're traveling, the sounds around us, the direction we're pointing, what we're looking at, etc.)
One of the most common questions I get about contextual apps is, "How does privacy play into all of this?" Are people really going to want to share information about their current surroundings? The answer is yes, if they feel it's worth it.
Before recommending a contextual approach for our projects, we'll try to answer the following question: Is the value the user is getting from this feature greater than the risk they are taking by sharing their context with the app? This is somewhat subjective, as different users will place a differing amount of value on app features; and some may be more risk adverse than others. But it's a good perspective to consider when determining if a contextual feature is worth investing in.
For example, I'm a Square Wallet user. Craig and Joy, the couple that own the amazing Next Stop Coffee Shop at the Glen Ellyn train station, use Square Register to collect payments. Every morning, I walk up to Craig, order my coffee and walk away without ever taking my wallet or my phone out of my pocket. The pictures below are what I see vs. what he sees.
Square works because it knows my location, knows Craig's location and allows us to make the transaction without having to exchange physical currency. Is Square tracking my location? Yes. They are also storing my picture and my credit card info. I am taking a conscious risk providing them with this information. Someone could hack into Square and get a lot of information about me. But it's worth the risk to me, because I trust that Square has good security measures in place and I like not having to take my wallet (or phone) out of my pocket to buy my coffee every morning.
Having said that, I'm not comfortable letting every app track my location; or send me push notifications; or access my camera. That's why phones allow you to grant specific permissions on an app-by-app basis. Sometimes value is greater than risk, sometimes it isn't. At the end of the day, the user must be able to control what an app is allowed to collect, store and share. Given users' variable risk tolerance, apps must be smart enough to work with and without contextual information.
In the employee/enterprise use cases however; the risk is very low. In most cases, the user already trusts the application's owner because they work for the company supplying the app. There are many value-added workforce productivity use cases where we can leverage a user's context to push information to them without requiring them to ask for it; particularly for field service workers, maintenance staff, outside sales reps and point-of-service personnel.
The paradigm shift of contextual awareness is incredibly powerful and offers a new way of thinking about human-computer-interaction. While we embark on this new paradigm we must consider that privacy is not an all-or-nothing proposition. It is an individual choice that the user must be empowered to make.