Kids Being Tracked by Thousands of Android Apps without Permission

Personal data security is a sensitive subject matter in a modernized world when social media network giants, government entities, and financial firms are under serenity of the mishandling of literally millions of personal accounts. The issue of personal data being exposed perpetuates on many fronts, including on thousands of Android apps that were found to be tracking children without parental consent.

When it comes to our children, there is a certain level of respect and privacy that is expected. Unfortunately, the bars have fallen off when it comes to tracking children through thousands of Android apps found to collect data without the appropriate permission of their parents.

The underlying issue with tracking children who are under the age of 13 is that matters become illegal going against COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act). Such a matter is taken seriously in the eyes of law enforcement.

As many as 5% of 5,800 popular Android apps released on the Google Play Store between November 2016 and March 2018 are suspected to have tracking capabilities that could collect user data without permission. Of those apps, about 1,100 of them are found to share sensitive information with third-parties. Such data is commonly used for targeted and behavioral advertising, which may focus a certain demographic.

Many of the suspected apps that collect personal user data, as many as 1,280 apps according to an Education Week study called "Won't Somebody Think of the Children?", were using Facebook integration and 92% of them didn't protect kids under the age of 13 through its configuration settings.

What is most discerning about the possible tracking of children on thousands of Android apps is the fact that Google doesn't appear to be doing much about the issue. However, Google's terms of service clearly prohibits sharing of persistent identifiers in apps. A way that some unscrupulous developers may get around the roadblock is through the idea of the data shared not being technically defined as personal data but instead data used in conjunction with other data on long periods of time.

The so-called persistent identifiers found in over 2,000 Android apps on the Google Play Store have been in violation of the Google terms of service, which resulted in those apps being banned from the store. While many apps are caught up in the grey area of being found to share personal information that could violate COPPA, there remains to be an uncertain number of apps that continue to be offered on the store that could track kids without proper permissions.

In knowing the practices of Google aren't exactly in line with what most parents would want, Google isn't alone in the fight. Many third-party app stores or sources have an unknown number of apps that not only violate COPPA, but they could be violating many other rules of collecting and sharing data without permission or proper notification.

What we can all do to limit unknown data sharing of apps that may be used by kids is to first verify the sharing and data collection settings within an app. Most apps will permit the user or parent to set a level of privacy and review the privacy policies of the app. If the policy or privacy settings are not available within an app, use of the app should then be discontinued, and the app should be deleted.