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Just because an app for kids looks innocuous doesn’t mean it’s not doing shady things in the background. Google has reportedly taken action against three children’s apps on the Play Store (Princess Salon, Number Coloring, and Cats & Cosplay) for allegedly violating its data collection policies, according to a report in TechCrunch.
According to the report, Google took action on the apps after researchers from the International Council for Digital Responsibility, a non-profit privacy watchdog, reported the violations to him. None of the links to the apps on the Play Store currently work, which seems to support the theory that they were fired for a reason. in a statement On its website, IDAC indicated that one of the problems was related to the software development kits used in the three applications: Unity, Appodeal and Umeng.
The organization claimed that its tests had found that certain versions of the three SDKs used in the applications “did not comply with Google Play’s broader policies on data collection.” Although the IDAC did not list all the alleged violations in detail, it did highlight a specific issue related to certain versions of the Unity SDK.
“IDAC testing highlighted that certain versions of the Unity SDK were collecting the user’s AAID and Android ID simultaneously, which may have allowed Unity to bypass privacy controls and track users over time and across the devices, ”the organization said.
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IDAC goes on to explain that this is important because when the AAID, which is a unique and resettable identification for advertising that basically allows ad networks to create a custom data profile of their likes and dislikes, among other things, is linked to the Android ID, creates a “bridge” that allows companies to keep track of users.
Android ID is another unique identifier that, unlike AAID, cannot be reset. The privacy organization concludes that the “bridge of identification” ultimately renders users’ ability to reset their AAID useless. As explained by Cabling, users can choose to reset their AAID to prevent the profiles that ad networks have collected about them from growing further or force the networks to create a new profile on them entirely.
According to TechCrunch, the Princess Salon, Number Coloring, and Cats & Cosplay apps had more than 20 million downloads between them.
Gizmodo reached out to Google to inquire about the IDAC report and confirm whether it took any action on these apps because of it. We will update this blog if we receive a response.
If these apps were actually collecting data that allowed them to track kids across devices, that’s pretty disturbing. While I don’t have kids, if I did, I’d be pretty grumpy if their games were collecting and building profiles on them. Besides being gruesome, it is also a possible violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, a federal law that prohibits the operators of websites and online services, including applications and social networks, from collecting personal information from children under the age of 13 without parental consent.
[TechCrunch and IDAC]
