Building COPPA-compliant competition flows for kids

When I was seven, I entered a competition at a local toy shop. The new James Bond movie, Licence to Kill, had just hit the theatres (eek, that dates me) and the competition was to promote the movie. The challenge was to build a vehicle out of LEGO to help James Bond escape from a desert island. (Did Licence to Kill even feature a desert island?)  Read More

Designing efficient data transactions under GDPR

Data is a currency. Before May 2018, users  —  who provide or create this data in the first place  —  were secondary to this economy. The Data Protection Act gave the public recourse, but very little transparency, and there was little understanding of the value of the data they were giving away daily. GDPR has put power in the hands of the users, and many companies have yet to understand that they need to explain exactly what their users are getting, at what costs, and why they should trust them, before they hand over their valuable data. Read More

SafeFam certification helps brands work more safely with young YouTubers

YouTube is a challenge for brands. On one hand, despite the fact that YouTube is an over-13 platform, it is one of the best places to reach under-13 audiences at scale. The vast subscriber bases of channels such as Sis VS Bro and Ryan ToysReview have sparked an increase in the number of kid-focused channels on the platform, and sponsored collaborations are beneficial to both the influencers and the brands. Read More

5 things we learned while refining Verifiable Parental Consent for kids apps

Apps and games that need to collect personally identifiable information (PII) from kids require the parents to give their consent. Given the sensitive nature of this information, we take extra measures to make sure that the parent of the child is really the one giving the consent. Under COPPA and GDPR-K, one of the ways to do so is by performing a credit card transaction for a small charge ($1). Here are some of the interesting things we’ve learned while iterating on our parental consent flows: Read More