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“This is as much a black eye on the federal government as the tech space,” Hector Balderas, New Mexico’s attorney general, said of a lawsuit he filed this week alleging that Google and Twitter violated children’s privacy law. “The children of this country ultimately pay the price.” “These sophisticated tech companies are not policing themselves,” the New Mexico attorney general, Hector Balderas, said. Without explicit, verifiable permission from parents, children’s sites and apps are prohibited from collecting personal details including names, email addresses, geolocation data and tracking codes like “cookies” if they’re used for targeted ads.īut the New Mexico lawsuit and the analyses of children’s apps suggest that some app developers, ad tech companies and app stores are falling short in protecting children’s privacy.

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act protects them from being improperly tracked, including for advertising purposes. They reported that more than half of the apps, including those by Tiny Lab, shared details with outside companies in ways that may have violated the law.Īlthough federal law doesn’t provide many digital privacy protections for adults, there are safeguards for children under 13. These findings are consistent with those published this spring by academic researchers who analyzed nearly 6,000 free children’s Android apps. The review of 20 children’s apps - 10 each on Google Android and Apple iOS - found examples on both platforms that sent data to tracking companies, potentially violating children’s privacy law the iOS apps sent less data over all.

The suit also contends that Google misled consumers by including the apps in the family section of its store.Īn analysis by The New York Times found that children’s apps by other developers were also collecting data. The suit accuses the app maker, Tiny Lab Productions, along with online ad businesses run by Google, Twitter and three other companies, of flouting a law intended to prevent the personal data of children under 13 from falling into the hands of predators, hackers and manipulative marketers. Kim Slingerland said she was troubled to learn that a game app she had downloaded for her son had shared personal data, including location information.