When it comes to protecting the privacy of children, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been found the efforts of mobile app developers unsatisfactory. They recently published a report titled “Mobile Apps for Kids: Disclosures Still Not Making the Grade” that highlights the issues with the status quo of applications on the iOS App Store and the Google Play store.
You might be able to tell from the use of the adverb “still” in the title, that this is their second look into the matter. Their first report titled “Mobile Apps for Kids: Current Privacy Disclosures are Disappointing” painted a poor picture of transparency about the privacy of applications.
In their second report they find that despite initiatives to increase transparency, there has been little improvement over the year. In fact the report claims that in many cases the situation is now worse than last year, since now there are a number of applications in mobile stores that have a discrepancy between the privacy disclosures made by the app, and its actual practices.
