While important meetings were held last week at the Fira de Barcelona, official site of the Mobile World Congress (MWC), others took their meetings elsewhere in the city as part of the Heroes of the Mobile Fringe Festival. One of those meetings took place in a small room in the basement of the Gild International clubhouse. The venue wasn’t the easiest to find, but it was a nice place to convene a roundtable on the subject of “Privacy and Mobile Apps.”

Moderated by TechCrunch European Editor Mike Butcher, the panel included speakers from SNR Denton, GetJar, Poynt and more. Only about 20 people were in the audience, far from the hundreds that show up for the big keynotes on the main MWC stage, but the topic is arguably one of the most important of our day. Organizers from MEF put the panel together in a matter of weeks, shortly after the CEO of Path made his apology for storing users’ phone contacts and Path changed how it treats users of its application. (No doubt, organizers could merely wait a week or a few days for some sort of story to hit the news that would make the topic as timely as ever.)

I have to say, it was one of the livelier and more engaging roundtable discussions, with audience members encouraged to interact with the panelists and actually doing so. At one point, a member of the audience brought up Target and its system for figuring out the buying habits of customers, including the pregnant teen whose father was… well, surely you’ve heard the story. When it comes to marketing, privacy spans a wide area, from those highly publicized cases involving big retailers to the smaller apps developers. 

It’s a crazy world when people freely share information about themselves on Facebook and then get irate when they think someone might be getting access to some piece of information about them. However, I understand it’s one thing to post your stuff and another to have someone getting at your phone contacts without your consent. The New York Times Bits blog reported last week that it’s possible for someone to get access to someone’s photos on Apple and Android mobile devices and make those photos public – a proposition that set off New York Senator Charles Schumer enough to ask the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate. The latest word  is Schumer will be meeting with Apple and Google executives.

Ironically, that’s just the type of scenario that people on last week’s panel said they want to avoid: the renegade lawmaker who takes it upon himself to declare war on tech companies and bring fear into the minds of consumers. It’s worth noting that the NYT’s article didn’t say people were stealing photos – rather that it was demonstrated that it could be done. (Some will say there’s no distinction; if it can be done, it probably is being done. Still, there’s a difference.)

No vote was taken, but panelists and audience members seemed to agree that the industry needs to do something before regulators do. MEF isn’t leaving it all up to the GSMA, either, to get the ecosystem on a level playing field. GSMA last week announced a privacy initiative related to apps, with European operators starting to implement guidelines for their own operator-branded mobile apps. It appears that privacy is too big an issue for just one, albeit large, association to tackle.

When I spoke with MEF Global Chairman Andrew Bud before last week’s session, he stressed that one of the things MEF wants to do is make sure guidelines are clearly understood not only by industry players but by consumers. Even when people are presented with a list of “Permissions,” they don’t always bother reading through it – they just click “Accept & download.” (This, in my opinion, is where you might want to consider user responsibility in the equation too. But hey, if people aren’t reading and understanding it all, that would be to the detriment of the apps industry, so it’s something to consider.)

It’s also worth noting that the apps industry needs to enforce its privacy policies on a global scale and take into consideration that someone from California is providing an app for someone in the U.K. and someone in the U.K. is selling to another person in South Africa and so on. Business without borders, as they say - and differing privacy laws.

GSMA’s initiative, backed by network operators, is an important step toward the industry addressing transparency and control of how data is used in mobile applications, Bud said in response to an email this week. But he added that MEF’s global membership base represents the total span of the mobile ecosystem, from developers and service providers to brand owners and handset manufacturers and operators.

“Our roundtable held at MWC last week, held together with app stores, media agencies, lawyers and service providers, demonstrated the need to take a holistic look at the issue with a focus on ensuring transparency and sustaining consumer trust,” he said. “Our perspective is that the responsibility for doing so lies with all players across the value chain and the best way forward is to offer practical tools that gain the consumer’s informed consent.”

We can look forward in coming weeks to the MEF formally announcing its privacy initiative and deliverables focusing on building consumer trust. Bud says trust between mobile consumers and the apps they use is inevitably sensitive and “absolutely vital” to the development of the industry. Clearly, it’s not going to be easy, but anyone willing to tackle this issue deserves our support.

On a side note, I was able to catch up with Carrier IQ last week. You’ll recall that Carrier IQ was accused last year of providing software that logs keystrokes, tracks location and does all kinds of nefarious things if certain blogs are to be believed. Andrew Coward, vice president of Marketing & Product Management, said the company learned a lot as part of the controversy – like that “cease and desist” order it sent to the security researcher in the early days was not a good idea.

The purpose of putting Carrier IQ’s software on phones was to make network operators aware of network deficiencies so they could improve customer service, but the company was accused of doing a whole lot more. I’m not sure how anyone bounces back from that. Coward said Carrier IQ hasn’t lost any carrier customers as a result of the debacle and executives hope that Sprint will reinstate its software on phones after manufacturers finish with some updates. “One of the things we’re trying to do is make sure we’re transparent,” he said, so much so that it revealed a lot of information about its software that most companies wouldn’t want to do for competitive reasons.

The company was at MWC to show off a new module that enables mobile operators to include customer experience analytics in their customer service portal. Essentially, consumers would be able to look at a screen and see how an app drained their battery or where call quality falls below average. It’s a kind of self-help tool for smartphones. Coward notes that smartphones have a higher “no-fault-found” return rate than feature phones, accounting for up to 40 percent of returned devices. So if people can determine and resolve issues with their smartphones without calling customer support, it’s a win all around.

Whether carriers want their customers to see this level of detail is another matter, but if everyone’s playing the “transparency” game, then it would seem there’s nothing to lose.