These 42 Disney Apps Are Allegedly Spying on Your Kids

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monkeymagick

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The House of Mouse is facing a class action lawsuit from a mom in San Francisco. Filed in California courts last Thursday, the suit claims that Disney is violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Apparently without parental consent, Disney is collecting "persistent identifiers" through its SDK and tracking the child's activities across multiple apps and devices with the information being sold to third-parties going against COPPA's safeguards which is suppose to protect children.

The company had been penalized previously for $3 million in violation of COPPA with its Disney Playdom Division after registering 1.2 million users, mostly kids and collecting full names along with identifying information. Time to uninstall all those Frozen apps, but it will be hard to let-it-go -- pun fully intended.

The class-action suit targets Disney and three other software companies -- Upsight, Unity and Kochava -- alleging that the mobile apps they built together violate the law by gathering insights about app users across the Internet, including those under the age of 13, in ways that facilitate "commercial exploitation."
 
Wow if they are really doing this...honestly fuck them and I hope they get a massive penalty.
Also those apps should be pulled from the Play store etc
 
Disney is evil. The way they market, the way they sell junk food to kids, the way they make Taiwanese and Chinese children make their clothing and toys. The materials and chemicals they make them with...

I wish it was just spy apps, but to be honest, that's the nicest thing this evil corporation does these days.
 
monkeymagick said:
The company had been penalized previously for $3 million in violation of COPPA with its Disney Playdom Division after registering 1.2 million users, mostly kids and collecting full names along with identifying information. Time to uninstall all those Frozen apps, but it will be hard to let-it-go -- pun fully intended.
Click to expand...

$3 million is chump change to Disney. As long as they make more revenue from collecting and selling the data than from the fines and lawsuits, they could care less about the law.

My daughter plays some Disney games plus others on a tablet with a custom ROM, no data plan, and a privacy blocker. If an online account is required though, we create a mule account.
 
I worked on a few apps for kids and COPPA is basically the first thing management beats into your head. This was clearly intentional and they should be punished far more severely than this paltry fine.

The other thing that got me was the phrsae "in ways that facilitate "commercial exploitation." so it's cool if the user is over 14 years old?? this should be stopped across the board.
 
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