Do you know if apps with which children enjoy their safety? A team of researchers from the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) of the University of Berkeley has studied compliance with the Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) in these mobile applications for the little ones, through a scalable dynamic analysis that allows the automatic evaluation of privacy behaviors of Android apps.
After studying 5,855 applications aimed at children, the research concludes that most of these apps, 57%, violate the privacy of their users mainly due to the use of data by third parties.
apps for children and privacy
Although many apps offer options in their configuration to respect the federal law that protects minors in the United States, by disabling tracking, their results suggest that a majority of applications either do not use these options or propagate them in wrong way.
In addition, researchers believe that 19% of apps for children send user IDs to third parties to show targeted ads (something specifically prohibited against children in the United States), 4.8% of these applications share the location or contact information without parental consent, 40% send personal data without applying reasonable security measures, and 39% breach their contractual obligations to protect children's privacy.
According to those responsible for this project, their work is distinguished from previous research due to the ability of this system to discover possible privacy problems prevalent in a large number of applications for children. There are so many apps for Children and being an ecosystem, scale analysis is important to understand what is the situation of respect for privacy.
Although it is not easy to know the exact number of applications for children available in the Play Store, these researchers consider their results to be representative , given that the applications they have examined are the most popular.
Also, users can check their results to understand how they violate the privacy of apps for children they use. Finally, these researchers are confident that developers can use their system to assess whether their applications They comply with privacy policies before launching apps for the public.In addition, regulators could use it to detect deceptive and suspicious activities in the marketplace.
sharenting, a problem for parents
In line with the lack of privacy of the little ones, it is worth noting that there are many fathers and mothers who are obsessed with sharing every second of their children's lives on social networks, following the fashion of sharenting .This English term refers to the bad habit of publishing virtual photo albums that expose the privacy of our children to strangers and this may have its risks.
This trend can be dangerous because it offers too many clues about the privacy of boys and girls , printing on the network a social footprint that can have medium and long-term effects.
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