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Google has removed several popular Android apps from its Play Store after they were found to violate its own data collection rules. The International Digital Accountability Council (IDAC) informed Google that Princess room, Number Coloring Y Cats and Cosplay, which together have more than 20 million downloads, violated company policy, leading to their removal.
“The practices we observed in our research raised serious concerns about data practices within these applications,” said IDAC President Quentin Palfrey. “We applaud Google for taking steps to enforce these applications and the data practices of third parties within these applications.”
As Palfrey suggests, it is not the application code itself that violated the Play Store rules, but the third-party frameworks on which they are based. The apps used versions of the Unity, Appodeal, and Umeng SDKs, all of which collected Android ID and Android Advertising ID data. By doing so, they were able to violate Google’s privacy protection regulations.
Privacy violation
It does not appear that these violations were intentional and it is not possible to know how much user data, if any, was taken by the three applications in question. However, because these apps were aimed at children, any potential infringement, particularly one like this that could be used to track users, should be taken very seriously.
At least two of the developers of the removed apps, Creative APPS and Libii Tech, still have apps available through the Play Store, and versions of the removed apps can still be downloaded from APK sites. The versions of the applications published through the App Store did not appear to contain the same privacy violations as those available on Android devices.
There are nearly three million apps available on the Play Store, with thousands more being added every day. For Google, making sure everyone adheres to its privacy protocols is a big business.
Recently, the security firm Avast discovered 21 adware applications on the Google Play Store, many of them disguised as games and gaming platforms, that could cause significant damage to users’ devices.
Malicious apps (the full list of which can be found here) have been found to bombard users with intrusive advertisements and possibly generate huge phone bills, they have been downloaded almost eight million times in total.
Via Engadget
