July 28 2011 - 1:23 pm - by Kashmir Hill
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For its parental monitoring app that can be placed on kids’ smartphones to allow for tracking of their movement, text messages and photos, Location Labs sends periodic alerts to the phone, reminding the coddled children that they are being monitored.

How can companies with lots of sensitive data about us strive for “privacy by design” instead of “embarrassment by design“? After Fitbit.com fell into the latter camp by failing to foresee the downside of making its users’ activity-tracking-journals public by default (when one of the 800 activities users tracked was S-E-X), I reached out to Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian, who has been pushing companies since the 1990s to embrace the concept of “privacy by design.”

“Stories like that one are why one of the core principles of ‘privacy by design’ is for companies to make users’ data private by default,” says Cavoukian.

Out of a desire to have successful “social strategies,” many companies pimp out their users’ info as much as possible. Fitbit’s experience, and that of companies like Facebook and Google — sued for Beacon and Buzz, respectively — show the pitfalls of that strategy. Hence, Cavoukian’s decade-long campaign is finally starting to resonate with tech companies. Both Zynga and Groupon mention privacy as a business-limiting concern in the S-1 filings for their upcoming IPOs.