Big Boys Sign Consumer Privacy Pact

Six of the world’s top consumer technology companies have agreed to provide greater privacy disclosures before customers download applications in order to protect the personal data of millions of consumers, California’s attorney general said on Wednesday.

The agreement binds Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Research In Motion, and Hewlett-Packard — and developers on their platforms — to disclose how they use private data before an app may be downloaded, Attorney General Kamala D. Harris said.

“Your personal privacy should not be the cost of using mobile apps, but all too often it is,” said Harris.

Currently 22 of the 30 most downloaded apps do not have privacy notices, said Harris. Some downloaded apps also download a consumer’s contact book.

Google said in a statement that under the California agreement, Android users will have “even more ways to make informed decisions when it comes to their privacy.”

Apple confirmed the agreement but did not elaborate.

Harris was also among U.S. state lawmakers who on Wednesday signed a letter to Google CEO Larry Page to express “serious concerns” over the web giant’s recent decision to consolidate its privacy policy.

The policy change would give Google access to user information across its products, such as GMail and Google Plus, without the proper ability for consumers to opt out, said the 36 U.S. attorneys general in their letter.

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Google, which last week created a bit of chaos with the launch of a Gmail application for Apple iOS devices, has decided to put out discontinue its Gmail application for the BlackBerry.

As of Nov. 22, Google will no longer offer technical support to users of the application, nor will it allow people to download it anymore, the company wrote in a blog post.

However, people will be able to continue using it, although Google will put its development efforts on the version of the application for mobile browsers, available at gmail.com.

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Blackberry Delays Update

Last week at its BlackBerry DevCon conference, Research in Motion tried to get developers excited about the upcoming PlayBook OS 2.0 mobile operating system, to spur developers to create applications for RIM’s BlackbBerry PlayBook tablet, released last spring to poor reviews and low sales. But yesterday, RIM wrote in a blog post that it was delaying the release of the PlayBook 2.0 OS “until we are confident we have fully met the expectations of our developers, enterprise customers, and users.”

PlayBook OS 2.0 was originally promised for October 2011, but RIM has now set a target of February 2012. To meet the new February 2012 release date, RIM said it was dropping a key feature originally promised for PlayBook OS 2.0: its popular BlackBerry Messenger instant-messaging service.

Developers were looking forward to the promised October PlayBook 2.0 OS release in hopes it might spur sales of the poorly selling tablet, especially as the original timing would have taken advantage of the holiday sales season that will also see the release of the unified tablet/smartphone Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” operating system and a bevy of new smartphones using Microsoft’s recently released Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango” operating system, in addition to Apple’s strong-selling iPad and new iPhone 4S, both featuring the recently released iOS 5 operating system.

The PlayBook OS is based on the QNX operating system that RIM bought in spring 2010 to be the basis for its tablets and, sometime in the 2012-13 timeframe, be the basis for a new operating system for its BlackBerry smartphones. Last week, RIM said that it will provide a unified tablet/smartphone operating system called BBX, based on the QNX/PlayBook platform. It said that applications developed for the PlayBook OS would be compatible with BBX, but did not make the same promise for BlackBerry OS apps.

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Playbook To Focus On Corporate Space

With the Playbook supposedly launching in April, it is expected that RIM will  a lot of their marketing budget on the corporate space. This is the best strategy for RIM since the company already has a strong presence in the enterprise space with companies that already use Blackberry services as part of their electronic communication infrastructure.

RIM is expected to leverage is clients existing investment in BES Blackberry Enterprise Server). RIM’s strategy gives Playbook a small advantage; since BES customers will be able to utilize functions like provisioning, configuring, applying corporate policies, application deployment/management and auditing PlayBook devices using the BES infrastructure that they already have in place.  Read More….