The Center for Digital Democracy and the US Public Interest Research Group are taking on the Federal Trade Commission to address privacy issues in mobile marketing.
Executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy Jeff Chester announced his intention to file a complaint at the FTC’s town hall-style meeting, Beyond Voice: Mapping the Mobile Marketplace, held this week. The goal of the complaint is to update a 2006 complaint on interactive marketing techniques and threats to consumer privacy to include mobile marketing practices.
“The mobile marketing industry has embraced many of the same profiling and targeting technologies that have been a problem online,” Chester said in an interview with DMNews. “What we intend to do is to push the FTC to address privacy around mobile marketing.”
The new complaint addresses marketing practices from a technological level. It will examine Enpocket’s Personalization Engine, a behavioral technology for the mobile device. It will also look at technologies from other companies which profile gender, age, language, income, education, country, state, ZIP/postal code, GPS coordinates, behaviors and in the context of voicemail and text messages.
The complaint will also encourage the FTC to look specifically at the privacy and consumer protection needs of those under 18, as well as different ethnicities, including Hispanics.
