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
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
The announcement that Oath has just been hit with the largest fine in the history of COPPA underlines the volume and quality of child-directed inventory being bought and sold within the mainstream (adult) programmatic exchanges. Read More
If you’re building a game or app for kids (under-13 in the US or under-16 in Europe), you need to consider how you’re going to manage age gates and parental permissions. Both are essential to ensure compliance with data privacy laws (COPPA and GDPR-K), but both are complex user flows and mismanaging them can create barriers to engagement for your easily-distracted young audiences. Here’s what you need to remember: Read More
With 170,000 kids going online for the first time every day, developers have to consider them a likely audience for their games, even if they are not deliberately child-directed. Data privacy laws for children such as COPPA (US) and GDPR-K (EU) are now well known, but the lack of clear guidance on how to apply them can make publishing such games difficult and scary for developers. Here are five things to keep in mind if you’re developing apps or sites for a children’s audience OR which might be accessed by children: Read More
This generation of kids are growing up in a digital environment defined by privacy laws preventing usage of their personal data. This is an entirely new chapter for the internet. Read More
Social plugins are one of the biggest unintentional harvesters of children’s personal data. Every time a child loads a web page or app which has a social widget, it’s gathering vast amounts of personal information about their activity. YouTube’s video player is one of the… Read More
Twelve months ago, the primary law protecting children’s data privacy was COPPA in the US. COPPA makes it illegal to capture any personal data on children under the age of 13. In less than a year, this has radically changed. Read More
In the last twelve months children’s data privacy law has expanded from what was just the US (COPPA) to covering all of Europe (under GDPR-K). But it’s not stopping there. Against many expectations, China has also introduced protection for children online. Recently China published the Personal Information Security Specification which, together with the country’s new 2016 Cyber Security Law, establishes specific digital data privacy protections for children under the age of 14. Read More
An academic study published this week reveals that thousands of kids’ apps are collecting and transmitting personal information to third parties, in possible breach of COPPA (and soon, GDPR-K). The research from academics at the University of California at Berkeley is the most comprehensive ever done to assess the data collection and sharing practices of the most popular kids’ games and apps, and the results were covered in The Guardian and elsewhere. It demonstrates how hard it is to comply with COPPA using existing ad technology built for the adult market, vs kidtech that is based on zero-data collection. And it usefully highlights the lack of common frameworks and standards between the regulators, the app stores and developers. Read More
