On Wednesday, The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) raised the curtain on its finalized MMA Mobile Application Privacy Policy, which is being hailed as the first guidelines document of its kind that addresses the core privacy issues and data processes of many mobile applications.

As MMW previously reported, the MMA Mobile Application Privacy Policy was created by the MMA Privacy & Advocacy Committee in response to the rapid growth in mobile app popularity among smartphone users and mobile marketers.

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It’s been announced that the  mobile marketing industry now has a brand new global trade organization known as the “Mobile Marketing Research Association,” or MMRA.

Launched this month, the MMRA was founded with the mission of uniting and serving the industry by developing professional standards and ethics to advance the use of mobile devices for marketing research.  According to its press release, the MMRA says it’s an “action-oriented organization designed to establish mobile research guidelines and best practices for sustainable growth, develop research and advocate for issues that grow the industry, provide quality education and evangelize the mobile marketing research channel for use by clients, researchers and participants.”

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Customers concerned about Carrier IQ remaining on their Sprint/HTC devices can now rest their minds.

In case you’re unfamiliar, the Carrier IQ software is what’s known as a rootkit that is installed at a carrier’s request on mobile phones. Carrier IQ raises user privacy concerns because it runs in the background and monitors and logs user activity. Carrier IQ is known to be installed on well over 100 million devices around the world.

As of today, however, Sprint Nextel says Carrier IQ software is effectively erased from devices across its network. The move was achieved in part by Sprint’s partnership with HTC, which yielded a firmware update targeting Carrier IQ.

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Lawmakers in California want smartphone makers to become smarter in their deployment of energy efficient technologies.

On Thursday, state legislators in California voted in a somewhat controversial move to obligate handset makers to ship energy-efficient battery chargers.

But here’s the kicker. Unlike so many legislative acts that often take three to five years to go into effect, the new requirement takes effect next year.

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Apple’s lawyers have been set free and they are on the attack.

On Wednesday, word surfaced that Apple has begun sending legal take-down notices to the servers hosting services that assist users in unlawfully obtaining software from the App Store.

The news is a welcome revelation to app developers who claim to lose no shortage of revenue right along with Apple when their digital creations are stolen.

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On Thursday, T-Mobile USA Inc. and Motorola Mobility Inc. confirmed that some of their mobile devices did, in fact, contain Carrier IQ Inc. software that collected user data.

The admission comes in response to calls from U.S. lawmakers to beef up safeguards of customer privacy.

According to a report from Bloomberg, approximately 450,000 T-Mobile customers “use nine devices containing the software that provides data including telephone numbers dialed and received.”

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The Wall Street Journal confirmed Thursday that the U.S. Justice Department is, indeed, investigating the pricing of eBooks,

The genesis of the probe dates backs to lingering suspicions about the appropriateness of Apple and its partners in publishing to limit discounting.

“We are also investigating the electronic book industry, along with the European Commission and the states attorneys general,” said Sharis Pozen, the Justice Department’s acting antitrust chief.

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