Tiny Lab, however, has its ways. At least according to what the attorney general for the US state of New Mexico alleges.
Last week, Attorney General Hector Balderas filed a
lawsuit charging Tiny Lab, as well as Twitter’s and Google’s advertising platforms, with surreptitiously grabbing kids’ information so as to profile them and target them for “commercial exploitation.”
According to Balderas, Tiny Lab is the maker of 91 games clearly targeted at kids or toddlers, with names like Fun Kid Racing, Candy Land Racing, Baby Toilet Race: Cleanup Fun, GummyBear and Friends Speed Racings.
On Wednesday, he put out a full list of game titles in
an announcement about the lawsuit.
It’s illegal to track children online. They’re protected by the
Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which prohibits improper tracking of under-13s, including for advertising purposes. Unless they collect explicit, verifiable permission from parents, children’s sites and apps aren’t supposed to collect personal details such as names, email addresses, geolocation data and tracking codes – such as cookies – for use in targeted ads.
