GroupM has launched a new set of guidelines for safeguarding the privacy of consumers using mobile devices.
The guidelines are designed to limit the quantity of data collected and passed from mobile devices during mobile marketing campaigns.
As part of this new initiative, GroupM is urging its mobile publishing partners to adopt the recommendations, which were developed in conjunction with Joule, the companys specialist mobile marketing unit.
“Its essential for marketers, agencies and third-party partners to establish and maintain consumer privacy protections while measuring mobile user behaviour to intelligently target ads,” says GroupM COO John Montgomery, who was a principle architect of the initiative along with Michael Collins, CEO of Joule. 
Montgomery and Collins say that the guidelines aim to ensure that personal identifiable information (PII) cannot be accessed via Unique User Identification (UUID) mechanisms that are part of mobile telephones. The second goal is to allow consumers to opt out of behavioral targeting of mobile advertisements.
“Were trying to take a stance on the appropriate and inappropriate use of consumer information and make sure those basic principles are used in mobile marketing techniques,” says Collins. “We need to make sure that UUID is not used to unlock PII.”
The guidelines urge mobile publishers to mask UUIDs whenever possible to ensure a greater degree of consumer privacy, and to clearly display privacy policies for consumer review. Publishers are also urged to explicitly state within privacy policies what information, including location and UUID, is being captured, paired with other data or shared with third parties. In addition, publishers should enable and provide notification of consumer opt-out.
