The Federal Trade Commission recently issued a report that raised new concerns about the ways in which kids are using smartphone and tablet applications that collect their personal information.
The FTC reviewed the websites for about 400 apps aimed specifically at kids and discovered that only 2 percent of them revealed whether the programs they pushed would collect any data on the kids using them, according to a report from San Francisco, California, television station
KGO. These apps can collect all types of personal data, including the user's location, phone number, contacts and call logs, and then share it with advertisers.
"Parents should be able to learn before they download apps what information will be used and how it's shared," wrote Patricia Poss, one of the FTC report authors, according to the news station.
Eduard Goodman, the chief privacy officer for
Identity Theft 911, maintains a blog on which he posts regularly about the issues consumers face when downloading apps that cull their personal data for information that can be sold to marketers.
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