The latest findings by a security website reveal that games like Angry Birds and Candy Crush collect and send the personal information of users to the advertising industry.
New Delhi,UPDATED: Jun 16, 2022 17:35 IST
Popular games like Angry Birds, Candy Crush and others were found snooping on your children. With easy access to mobile phones, most children spend the better part of their time playing games on mobile phones. Getting addicted to mobile gaming at a young age is hazardous in many ways. The games have now been found snooping on children. The latest findings by a security website reveal that the games collect and send the personal information of users to the advertising industry.
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As per a report by Pixelate, most gaming apps on Android and iOS share data with the ad industry. Games like Angry Birds 2 spy on kids when the apps are being used. A similar thing was also noticed with the Candy Crush Saga app. The apps for coloring and doing math homework were also found snooping on children . The apps collect kids’ general locations and send it to companies that are looking for users with the same interests. The apps even sell the collected information to others,
Pixalate, in its investigation, categorized every single app that might appeal to children. The company then tracked more than 391,000 child-directed apps across both Apple and Google Play Stores.
“Pixalate uses automated processing derived from a combination of signals (which at times is coupled with human intervention) to determine if an app is likely to be child-directed, including the app’s category, sub-category, content rating, and contextual signals (specifically, child-related keywords in the app’s title or the app’s description), the company blog read.
As per the study conducted by Pixelate, over 8 per cent of Apple App Store apps and 7 per cent of Google Play Store apps are child-directed. Around 40 per cent of child-directed mobile apps have potential access to the personal info of users. The report says that personal info is 42 per cent more likely to be shared with advertisers on child-directed apps. Over 12,000 child-directed apps have potential access to personal information and have no detected privacy policy.
Published By:
Ankita Chakravarti
Published On:
Jun 16, 2022
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