Last year we’ve written about the so called Internet Sweep Day which was a coordinated audit by 19 members of the GPEN (Global Privacy Enforcement Networt) looking at over 2000 popular sites and applications worldwide.
Between the May 12 and 18 the GPEN went ahead with organizing an international privacy sweep, specifically targeted at mobile applications, this time around involving 27 data protection authorities around the world.
The communicated issues to be examined before the sweep were as follows:
Sweep participants will be looking at the types of permissions an app is seeking, whether those permissions exceed what would be expected based on the app’s functionality, and most importantly from a transparency perspective, how the app explains to consumers why it wants the personal information and what it will do with it.
Participating authorities will look at some of the most popular apps or apps that are of particular interest in their country or region. For example, some authorities plan to focus on health-related apps or apps developed by public sector organizations.
A little later in the year we plan to take a look at some of the reactions from the sweep. This should help form an understanding of which elements are being closely looked at and therefore should be closely looked at by you.
Some of the interesting results will be found in Australia, UK, Spain, New Zealand, Mexico, Italy, Ireland, France, Germany and Canada.
