FTC Report Faults Mobile App Makers On Privacy

On December 10th, the Federal Trade Commission ("FTC") issued a staff report, "Mobile Apps for Kids: Disclosures Still Not Making the Grade" -- a follow-up to an earlier staff report, "Mobile Apps for Kids: Current Privacy Disclosures Are Disappointing". The new staff report included results of a survey of children's mobile "apps" available in Apple's App Store and Google's Android Market. The survey concluded that apps normally provide parents with little or no information about privacy or interactive features prior to download.

In the new survey, the FTC tested children's apps' practices and compared them to the apps' disclosures. The FTC also studied whether these children-focused apps shared kids' information with third parties without disclosing those facts to parents. Like the earlier report, this report found that parents are often not given adequate information about data collection, about who has access to their kids' data, and about how their kids' data is