Privacy At Stake! Popular Apps Like Angry Birds, Candy Crush Revealing Children's Personal Information: Study
|The study found that 8% of all applications on the Apple store and 7% on the Google Play Store are children-directed apps. Out of them, about 42% of the applications are more likely to share personal information with advertisers.
In the digital era, it is a famous saying that "data is the new oil", as when it is processed, analysed and utilised efficiently, it holds a much greater value. However, privacy takes a significant blow while using the internet with every click and tap.
The ad-tech industry, an amalgamation of advertisement and technology, is getting flooded with data points. Among those, the prey for the advertising corporations and giant tech is children, as per the latest study, reported News 18.
Study On Over 1000 Child-Centric Apps
Recently, Pixalate, a California-based ad fraud protection, privacy, and compliance firm, conducted a study on over 1000 children-centric apps, including educational and gaming applications. The study revealed that most of the apps that are downloaded from the Google Play Store and other similar app stores forward children's data to advertising corporations.
Personal Information Shared With Advertisers
Popular applications for kids on the Play Store include gaming apps such as Angry Birds and Candy Crush. Other applications include educational apps such as mathematical problems, colouring, shape identification, etc. All these applications store pieces of information such as general locations, Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and other identifying data and then share them with the businesses that can anticipate and analyse their area of interest, making their foundation for targeted advertising.
Revelations
The Pixalate study revolves around the principles of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), passed by Congress in 1998 and aimed at protecting children's online privacy.
The study found that 8 per cent of all applications on the Apple store and 7 per cent of all applications on the Google Play Store are children-directed apps. Out of them, about 42 per cent of the applications are more likely to share personal information with advertisers.
Further, as per the statistics by the study, "programmatic advertisers" spend 3.1 times more per app on kid-directed apps compared to general audience applications.
Apple, Google Rejected Claims
However, The Washington Post reported that Apple and Google had rejected the claim that children's privacy on their app stores was at stake. Apple stated that Pixalate had a conflict of interest with their organisation, while Google called the research's methodology "overly broad."