Mark Testoni, president and CEO of SAP National Security Services, has said companies should give consumers more information on data collected by mobile applications they use, the New York Post reported Tuesday.
Testoni added that apps should have labels describing data privacy practices in the same way that food products contain nutritional labels.
“We have to look at this through a public policy perspective and make consumers more aware of the data being collected on us daily,” said Testoni, a 2018 Wash100 recipient.
He made the remarks in response to a security vulnerability that accidentally exposed the locations of classified U.S. military bases through a fitness tracking app that U.S. soldiers used while training.
The locations were revealed through data from Strava, a San Francisco, California-based global positioning system tracking company.
The app includes a “heat maps” feature that shows areas with high concentration of activity, such as military bases in Somalia, Niger, Syria and Afghanistan where soldiers trained.