Privacy is already a rather hot-button issue nowadays, but when it comes to the privacy of children, the issue is greatly compounded by the fact that children cannot make fully informed decisions.
It is not uncommon for children to have access to mobile devices, or to even own a device of their own. This is not a trend that needs to be combated, and the solution is not to keep mobiles away from children. There are however significant concerns when it comes to, what have become routine practices for many mobile apps, when such applications are used by kids.
What is troubling about the report is that it didn’t even deal with the broad range of mobile apps, but apps that were directly targeted towards kids. Of the 400 applications tested, 90% had ‘expressly indicated that they were intended to be used by a “kid,” child, infant or toddler, or a preschool or elementary school aged child.’ These you could expect, or hope in the very least, would have better standards of maintaining the user’s privacy.
However, the reality is that even these applications raised many privacy concerns. Since Android requires applications to declare permission up front before using them, the researchers for these reports could collect statistics about which permissions the applications asked for. The report also looked at how these statistics changed since the last report. What they found was a troubling increase in the use of features that could have privacy implications, features such as internet access, and geolocation access.
