In a world that fosters the saying, “Data is the new oil,” privacy takes major blows with each click and every tap. The ad-tech industry (amalgamation of advertisement and technology) is getting overflowed with data points. Among those, the target of the advertising companies and big tech are children, according to a new study.
An ad fraud protection, privacy, and compliance company named Pixalate, recently conducted a study on more than 1000 children-centric apps, including those for gaming and educational purposes. The study found that most of the applications that are downloaded from Google Play Store and other app stores, send children’s data to advertising companies.
Apps such as Angry Birds and Candy Crush are some of the most popular applications for kids on the Play Store. Other applications include mathematical problems, colouring, shape identification, etc. All these applications store general locations, IP addresses, and other identifying information, and then send them to the companies that can predict and analyse their area of interest, making their foundation for targeted advertising.
The study revolved around the principles of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The act was passed by Congress in 1998 and aimed at protecting children’s online privacy.
The study suggests that 8 per cent of all apps on the Apple app store and 7 per cent of all apps on the Google Play Store are child-directed applications. Among these apps, around 42 per cent of apps are more likely to share personal info with advertisers. As per the statistics given by Pixalate’s study, “programmatic advertisers” spend 3.1 times more per app on child-directed applications as compared to general audience applications.
Apple and Google denied that children’s privacy on the app stores was at stake, as per a report by The Washington Post. According to Apple, Pixalate had a conflict of interest with their organisation, while Google labelled the research’s methodology to be “overly broad.”
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