Mobile apps and childrens privacy: a traffic analysis of data sharing practices among childrens mobile iOS apps

Despite policy recognition of children’s vulnerability online, children’s apps (or parental apps involving children’s data) may share user data with third parties, which may be used to create detailed, long-term profiles of children, generating privacy risks.1 2 These risks have attracted policy attention from the Federal Trade Commission; Apple Inc. subsequently stipulated that apps developed for children may not send personally identifiable or device information to third parties and should not include third-party trackers or advertising. We conducted a cross-sectional study of top user-rated mobile apps labelled for children under 12 years available in the Apple App store in Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA as of July 2022 (https://kids-apps.healthprivacy.info). We aimed to (1) Characterise their data sharing practices through analysing their network traffic; (2) Identify the third parties who received the information transmitted from these apps. Building off previously reported methods,

Source: Archives of Disease in Childhood - October 30, 2023 Category: Pediatrics Authors: Pimienta, J., Brandt, J., Bethe, T., Holz, R., Continella, A., Jibb, L., Grundy, Q. Tags: Open access PostScript Source Type: research