Participants in the meeting voted on several areas that should be priorities. The group should, in the near term, develop a description of personal data used by mobile apps, should determine why data is collected and should determine what data is collected outside of an app's core functionality, participants said in a series of votes. The group should also focus on ways to notify users about the data collected in the appropriate context, they said.

But several participants urged the NTIA to take a step back and tell participants what it hopes to accomplish or describe in the multistakeholder process going forward. The NTIA's process to develop privacy standards "is unduly amorphous at this point," said Alan Raul, a privacy lawyer with the Sidley Austin law firm.

Berin Szoka, founder of free-market think tank TechFreedom, questioned whether a room full of people with "no business experience" would be able to create workable privacy standards for the mobile industry. The NTIA process will likely fail, he said, because it's led by the government and not industry.

The NTIA participants may be able to provide feedback to mobile app developers, but business decisions on privacy practices should be made "behind closed doors" by people in the industry, he said.

Much of the discussion, however, was on whether the NTIA should focus on mobile app transparency first. The NTIA process needs to define a complete set of fair information practices for mobile apps, in addition to transparency guidelines, said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union.