Mobile Apps

In the minds of mobile shoppers, where is the line between convenience and personal space/privacy? We now have two retailers — Walmart and Amazon, the giants of in-store and online shopping, respectively — separately testing programs to deliver purchases directly into your home or your car trunk when the shopper is nowhere near. 

Both efforts rely on mobile devices connecting shoppers to the scene of the delivery, where customers can theoretically watch the delivery in real time. It isn’t practical or likely, but that’s the idea. Mobile is what justifies these attempts.

Walmart’s efforts, focused entirely on shoppers letting the retailer unlock a home’s front door and put away the groceries in the shopper’s kitchen and refrigerator/freezer, is an idea that begs for a privacy/security disaster to happen. A prudent executive looks at any cutting-edge plan and asks, “What could go wrong with this and how bad is it for our customers if it does?”

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IT is seeing a very dangerous collision of two trends: BYOD and mobile apps. IT’s job is, among other things, to protect corporate data, a portion of the company’s intellectual property. And yet easily downloaded consumer apps are threatening that data security by sharing their sensitive data with mobile apps that have almost infinite capabilities.

Consider this reference from a scary story courtesy of The Intercept: “When launched for the first time, [popular app Sarahah] immediately harvests and uploads all phone numbers and email addresses in your address book. Although Sarahah does in some cases ask for permission to access contacts, it does not disclose that it uploads such data, nor does it seem to make any functional use of the information.”

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