FTC: Mobile apps for kids disturbing, come up short in privacy policy dept.

Mobile apps and the information they gather, particularly without consent, have stolen headlines for the past week, and the hottest tech controversy around is about to get more ammo: The Federal Trade Commission released a report today condemning child-focused apps, their developers, and the stores that carry them for not sufficiently disclosing their privacy policies. The FTC noted in its report, titled “Mobile Apps for Kids: Current Privacy Disclosures Are Disappointing,” (seriously, the feds actually bolded that gem) that “while staff encountered a diverse pool of apps for kids created by hundreds of different developers, staff found little, if any, information in the app marketplaces about the data collection and sharing practices of these apps.” But the FTC didn’t just observe the ugly state of apps – they aim to fix it, too. The agency said that it will work with “all members of the kids app ecosystem” to improve up-front disclosure.

Source: New York Times