Child Online Protection Act COPPA FTC privacy
FTC Reaches Settlement with Mobile App Path over Privacy Violations
The Federal Trade Commission announced a settlement with the social networking app Path over charges that the app secretly collected information from mobile users' address books without their consent. The FTC also fined the company $800,000 for violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which prohibits the collection of personal information from a children without obtaining parental consent. The consent order requires Path to implement a comprehensive privacy program and to submit to independent privacy assessments for the next 20 years. The FTC has released a series of reports documenting privacy problems with mobile apps that collect the personal information of children. Recently, EPIC submitted comments supporting the FTC’s proposed improvements to the children’s online privacy rule, which the agency ended up adopting. For more information, see EPIC: FTC and EPIC: Children's Online Privacy.