The on mobile privacy, Thursday in Washington, D.C., focused on ways to improve the transparency of the privacy practices of mobile apps, but several privacy advocates questioned the value of creating more transparency without rules on the way apps will use the personal data of users. Mobile privacy standards need to also address the fair collection of data, security and other issues in addition to transparency, said Susan Grant, director of consumer protection for the Consumer Federation of America.

"Transparency, in itself, has no value," added Pat Walshe, director of privacy at GSMA, a mobile carrier trade group. "People need tools, they need mechanisms, to express choice."

One mobile app asked Walshe to agree to a 21,000-word privacy policy, he said. "That was transparent, but it was useless," he added.

During much of meeting, meeting facilitator Marc Chinoy, president of the Regis Group, asked the audience of more than 200 people for ideas on how to improve mobile app transparency. Several participants offered ideas, including software that can tell mobile device users what private information they're sharing, and the use of icons to represent privacy concepts, instead of long, multipage privacy policies.

NTIA officials defended the focus on mobile transparency, saying it was a discrete area where participants in the process could possibly reach agreement. Participants in the process to develop privacy codes of conduct will decide the direction of the process in the future, said Lawrence Strickling, NTIA's administrator. "We had to start somewhere," he said.