Restoring Trust in Your Technology

Monday brought quite the stir in the consumer technology space. Joining forces in an open letter to President Barack Obama, eight of the largest technology companies proposed principles for reforming government surveillance laws and practices, pointing to the summer revelations about data collection by the National Security Agency (NSA) to highlight the urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide.

The letter concludes with eight strong voices for reform signed on with quotes of support behind these principles. One quote in particular caught my eye. Brad Smith, General Counsel and Executive Vice President, Legal and Corporate Affairs, Microsoft said, “People won’t use technology they don’t trust. Governments have put this trust at risk, and governments need to help restore it.”

In this simple statement, Mr. Smith has brought forth an important issue that goes beyond NSA surveillance, but includes any technology whether a server, software or device. This is very relevant to mobile devices, which are extremely personal. They are with us all the time and loaded with personal information and sensors measuring precisely what we are up to.

Just as the government has to collect personal data in exchange for security, we are often asked on personal devices to allow access to personal data in exchange for free apps or services. And just like the government, in many cases the apps go too far. Last week I read yet another story about a medical app that sends your personal information to three different ad networks, including “your phone number, your device's IMEI number, your exact geo-location, the Wi-Fi access points currently in use (and used in the past)” and more.

And BYOD is another example where consumers want one device to use for home and work, yet many do not trust their companies to respect the privacy of their personal data. What some employees have found are heavy and unwieldy MDM solutions imposed by the IT department that annoy the user and handicap productivity. Such enterprise centric solutions also beg the question to the user, who is looking at my data?

When we developed Secure Spaces, we wanted to give the consumer privacy options while also meeting corporate IT security. But we did it by making the IT department a guest on your device – not the other way around. Ensuring trust is the foundation of our product, because it opens up significant new use cases even beyond consumer privacy and BYOD. With simple, easy to create and “disposable” Secure Spaces, there is a whole new world of apps to download and safely segregate. App aggregation and services, guest mode, secure banking spaces, themed spaces and distributed mobile computing are all possible when there is trust in the underlying technology. We are re-thinking not only mobile security, but fundamentally how we use and interact with these amazing devices.

Brad Smith from Microsoft is right in saying “people won’t use technology they don’t trust,” but this doesn’t mean we have to settle for a lack of trust in our technology. Let’s give users control of their devices, control of their data and perhaps a better way to model their use of mobile devices around their real lives.

Alec Main, CEO of Graphite Software