"Money makes the world go around": identifying barriers to better privacy in children’s apps from developers’ perspectives

Conference item

The industry for children’s apps is thriving at the cost of children’s privacy: these apps routinely disclose children’s data to multiple data trackers and ad networks. As children spend increasing time online, such exposure accumulates to long-term privacy risks. In this paper, we used a mixed-methods approach to investigate why this is happening and how developers might change their practices. We base our analysis against 5 leading data protection frameworks that set out requirements and recommendations for data collection in children’s apps. To understand developers’ perspectives and constraints, we conducted 134 surveys and 20 semi-structured interviews with popular Android children’s app developers. Our analysis revealed that developers largely respect children’s best interests; however, they have to make compromises due to limited monetisation options, perceived harmlessness of certain third-party libraries, and lack of availability of design guidelines. We identified concrete approaches and directions for future research to help overcome these barriers.

Authors: Ekambaranathan, A; Zhao, J; Van Kleek, M

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Reviewed (other)
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
• Journal: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Issue: 2021
• Article number: 46
• Publication date: 2021-05-08
• Acceptance date: 2021-01-20
• Event title: 2021 ACM CHI Virtual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Event location: Online
• Event website: https://chi2021.acm.org/
• Event start date: 2021-05-08
• Event end date: 2021-05-13
• DOI: 10.1145/3411764.3445599
• ISBN: 9781450380966
• Language: English
• Keywords: FFR