"Privacy Advocates Want the FTC to Take On Invasive Daycare Apps"
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urges the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate privacy and security concerns with daycare and early education apps. A letter sent to the FTC by the EFF builds on the research conducted by Alexis Hancock, the EFF director of engineering, who discovered a number of security issues, including the insecure cloud storage of children's photos. In one case, the daycare app Tadpoles for Parents sent children's data to Facebook without disclosing it in its privacy policy. The EFF's concerns were never addressed by the company. The EFF discovered that many of the apps they investigated had previously been warned about the vulnerabilities by a different group of security researchers. Despite sharing sensitive information such as the number of diaper changes, the researchers discovered that over half of the 42 apps they examined did not disclose the use of third-party trackers. Parents are forced to choose between enrolling their children in daycare and sharing sensitive information with these apps, or not enrolling them at all. With rare exception, there are no options for parents to opt their children out of data sharing. The FTC enforces the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which governs what information companies can collect from children under the age of 13. However, because daycare apps collect children's data directly from parents and daycare providers, those safeguards are limited in their applicability. Daycares that receive Department of Education funding may be subject to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which limits schools' ability to share student data, but many parents have discovered that evasive privacy policies make it difficult to determine what happens to a student's data once it is collected by a third party. This article continues to discuss privacy advocates calling on the FTC to take action against invasive daycare apps.
CyberScoop reports "Privacy Advocates Want the FTC to Take On Invasive Daycare Apps"