The FTC’s settlement with a mobile app developer over privacy...
The FTC’s settlement with a mobile app developer over privacy violations -- including against children -- should prompt Hill action, Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, said Friday. The co-chair of the Congressional Privacy Caucus said the app maker, Path, “has not…
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only violated its own privacy policies, but also took advantage of children. How many more times does this need to happen before my colleagues in Congress are convinced to act?” Steps taken by companies thus far to adhere to their own privacy policies are “simply not enough,” he said: Without the FTC’s Section 5 authority to punish unfair and deceptive practices, “there would be absolutely no accountability.” A spokesman for Barton told us the lawmaker wants both Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) reform and “to go further by protecting our teens and addressing the usage of newer technologies,” which is why Barton and Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and fellow caucus co-chair, plan to “soon” reintroduce their Do Not Track Kids Act. The FTC said social network Path violated COPPA by collecting personal information from users it knew to be under 13. The company also asked users if they wanted the app to scan their mobile device’s contact list to find other Path users but did so regardless of the user’s response, the FTC said Friday (http://xrl.us/bod672). Under the proposed settlement, Path faces a civil penalty of $800,000 for the COPPA violations and “is prohibited from making any misrepresentations about the extent to which it maintains the privacy and confidentiality of consumers’ personal information,” according to the agency’s news release. Path said the child users were able to create accounts because the company’s system failed to automatically reject users that indicated they were under 13. “Before the FTC reached out to us, we discovered and fixed this sign-up process qualification, and took further action by suspending any under age accounts that had mistakenly been allowed to be created,” the company said in a statement (http://xrl.us/bod68k).