When it involves consumer data, we strongly believe that there’s just one true owner – the patron – and that is why we’re actively building technology that permits consumers to govern their data, in exchange for personalised and rewarding content.

But for each company like us, that strives for good practice, there are a handful skipping straight to fourth base with their consumers by collecting highly sensitive information comparable to personal identification and demographic data, causing major upset and promoting a way of intrusion and mistrust along the way in which.

This is the underlying anxiety that fuels the continuing privacy debate, but why does the mobile industry must be all in favour of the problem of privacy It seems there are less intrusive how you can get the knowledge a firm needs on its users.

A 2011 survey by the GSM Association found that a giant 81 per cent of mobile users regarded safeguarding their personal information as essential, while 76 per cent stated that they were selective about who they gave their personal information to. The Pew Research Centre also found that over 1/2 mobile users decided against installing an app after they realised how much personal information was required to run it. Put simply, consumers care about who they offer their personal information to and what it’s used for.  

Personalised service

Yet gathering personal information from consumers may be incredibly important for mobile companies, especially those hoping to create apps that offer a personalized service, or those seeking to implement targeted adverts for marketers. It is going to even be beneficial for the buyer, with a contemporary study by Ctrl-Shift, an independent research agency, finding that buyers were actually thinking about the belief of having the ability to remove noise and take away irrelevant marketing messages.

But companies can’t just go gathering this personal information without consent. In the event that they like to earn the trust in their consumers, they should allow them to know exactly what they’re going to do with their personal information and the explanations behind collecting it – many simply aren’t proactively doing this.

One of the most important problems arises when companies pass in this information to 3rd parties, usually without the consent of the patron, and so they subsequently get bombarded by unsolicited calls, texts or ads for services or products they’ve no real interest in.

If consumers aren’t sure what a service or app goes to do with their personal information then they won’t be confident in using it, not to mention spending money with it. In a 2011 global survey conducted by the trade body, MEF, 27 per cent of respondents cited security because the main reason they don’t transact more on their smartphones, while a survey conducted by TRUSTe found that one in three consumers rated privacy as their main concern when using smartphone apps. Companies clearly build trust with their consumers, and the main to that is transparency and control.

The best services make sure their consumers know exactly how their information is being collected and used, and supply them with access and control over it.  We believe our iOS app, dealBoard, is a superb example of the way this is often implemented well, having received exemplary Control and Transparency ratings in Ctrl-Shift’s research. In dealBoard we really gather no personal information from the patron, and with the knowledge we do request, we’re explicit and transparent about the way it shall be used. We also let our consumers see each of the information that we hold on them within the type of a word cloud, and permit them to edit it whenever they need.

One of the precise the way to gather information from consumers is to simply ask them. What can be surprising to a few people is that buyers aren’t actually averse to giving out personal information regarding themselves; they only want to know what it’s going for use for and the way it’s going to learn them.

Accurate information
Ctrl Shift found that customers are realistic about privacy, and may happily share significant amounts of accurate details about themselves, especially if it’s non-personal information akin to the brands they prefer or the things that interest them. What Ctrl-Shift found to be important is to produce consumers with some sort of immediate gratification, be that through gamified mechanics and/or some form of reward for his or her efforts.

Even better, while you could be completely transparent with the buyer and demonstrate that there’s a clear benefit in giving you the data, i.e. you provide us with ‘X’ details about yourself and we’ll show you how to lower your expenses on ‘X’ product, then they’ll be very happy to assist.

In dealBoard, for instance, our consumers get to enjoy a gamified brand-sorting task, and for providing us with this knowledge at the brands they prefer and dislike, we subsequently reward them by showing deals which might be relevant to them. Companies from all industries are gradually starting to catch sight of the advantages this more transparent approach has, with Tesco’s Clubcard Play being one of the. Tesco is hoping to make its Clubcard scheme more transparent and inspire higher levels of engagement from its consumers by developing a variety of products and games that offer them with access to their very own data and shopping habits.

We’ve moved into an age where increasingly business is conducted within the digital domain, and technology is becoming increasingly advanced. Using smartphones in our everyday lives will only continue to rise, whether it’s using an NFC-enabled handset to shop for lunch, Barclays’ Pingit app to transfer funds, or completing micro-transactions in a game. 

In an international that has become increasingly interested in privacy and oversharing of private data, ill-prepared mobile companies are absolute to be left behind as users discover ways to guard their information.

Most companies’ CRM, loyalty and other systems are a ‘corporate data asset’ that, frequently, combine the information that customers are happy for the corporate to carry, with potentially ‘toxic’ data, that has often been inferred over decades from multiple sources, with some sniffed from the consumer’s ‘data exhaust’. Profiles are inferred, often incorrectly, from that data trail.  This ‘soup’ of information carries a giant risk and, like attempting to ‘unmix’ an omelette, can’t be easily segregated. The outcome is potentially explosive, and will even become potentially illegal under EU privacy laws, as seen recently with the furore over Google’s change in privacy policy,  and the unification of 60 services and their user data under one agreement. Corporate data assets may be de-risked by developing mobile solutions that give consumers control in their data, and providing a framework where they feel a way of ownership.

Ctrl-Shift predicts that the marketplace for volunteered personal information may be worth £20bn (within the UK alone) by 2020. Now’s the time for firms to form honest, open relationships with their consumers and earn their trust and business even as. The mobile industry must embrace volunteered personal information, and steer far from generalised inference and intrusion on privacy, just because the other digital industries were doing so, and pave the way in which for mutually beneficial business practices someday.

Henry Lawson is the CEO of nFluence