Thousands of popular children’s apps available for download on Google Play may be violating child privacy laws, according to a new study, drawing more attention to big tech’s data-collection efforts.
The study analyzed 5,855 of the most popular free children’s apps and found that a majority of them may be violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). According to the study, thousands of the tested apps collected the personal data of children under age 13 without a parent’s permission.
“This is a market failure,” Serge Egelman, a co-author of the study and the director of usable security and privacy research at the International Computer Science Institute at UC-Berkeley, told the Washington Post. “The rampant potential violations that we have uncovered points out basic enforcement work that needs to be done.”
The researchers found that potential privacy violations came in different forms. More than 1,100 children’s apps collect identifying information from kids using tracking software whose terms of service actually prohibit their use for children’s apps. Researchers also found that nearly half the apps are not taking “reasonable procedures to protect the confidentiality, security, and integrity of personal information collected from children.”
Read more at Fox News.
THIS IS A RHETORICAL QUESTIONS PEOPLE. Of course Google and all other “social media” and “search engines” are tracking everything you do that uses them. If the camera on your laptop isn’t covered you are being filmed. Recordings are being made as well. You may not have ordered a microphone but you have one. What do people think Amazon Echo, Google Home, Alexa, and SIRI are? They call them “home assistants”. They do perform that function as away to get into your home. Like FaceBook, they are basically surveillance devices. There are certain words that all of these devices pick up and make serious and even dangerous to you assumptions. All of these companies are taking advantage of a very ignorant and naïve public and collecting every possible piece of information the government wants to know about you. This surveillance goes far beyond information for marketing and advertising purposes. My ISP just recently switched from Yahoo to Google as it’s search engine of record. From that day forward I spend a lot of time trying to shut off video advertising that fires up automatically without being clicked on and is very hard to shut off if at all. I also now get emails from businesses that I have never, and will never do business with. All because Google is making decisions from words I might have typed. This crap is really way beyond getting out of hand.