Are apps stealing company secrets? Smart device privacy concerns for businesses

Introduction

Privacy often feels like it is something that can be bought, sold and/or simply ignored. So many people use the old and worn argument: “If you have nothing to hide, why worry about privacy…” 

Privacy, certainly from an individual’s standpoint, has been center stage for a few years now. Debacles such as the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal have set the scene for hot privacy debates. Now the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the privacy debate back into center stage as “trace and track” apps have been scrutinized for their approach to privacy.

However, it isn’t just individual privacy that can be at risk from mobile apps. Corporate privacy and associated data security are also in the crosshairs of poorly-developed apps.

Isn’t privacy always about the individual and not the group?

There has been a lot of emphasis on privacy as an individual right. That’s fair enough. However, individual privacy is not the whole story. The idea of corporate privacy may seem like a contradiction, but there is a long-standing societal concept of “group privacy.”

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The idea of group privacy is nothing new. In fact it goes back to our Neolithic cousins. Archeologist, Dr. Sophie Moore, who has worked on the site of Çatalhöyük, talks about the notion of “group privacy,” where extended kin groups would come together, sharing the space in a privacy-enhanced way. 

A 2019 paper by Loi, et.al., “Two Concepts of Group Privacy,” discusses this notion of group privacy in a modern data-led context. The paper talks about two types of group privacy:

• WHVSV privacy, or the “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” effect
• Inferential privacy, or what can be inferred from a person’s actions (behavior) can potentially expose the privacy of another

Privacy, in the case of group privacy, is about retaining group-related (Read more...)