Google removes 3 Android apps for children, with 20M+ downloads between them, over data collection violations - TechCrunch

When it comes to apps, Android leads the pack with nearly 3 million apps in its official Google Play store.

Researchers at the International Digital Accountability Council (IDAC), a nonprofit watchdog based out of Boston, found that a trio of popular and seemingly innocent-looking apps aimed at younger users were recently found to be violating Google’s data collection policies, potentially accessing users’ Android ID and AAID (Android Advertising ID) numbers, with the data leakage potentially connected to the apps being built using SDKs from Unity, Umeng and Appodeal.

The three apps in question — Princess Salon​, Number Coloring and ​Cats & Cosplay — have now been removed from the Google Play app store, as you can see in the links above.

Google confirmed to us that it removed the apps after IDAC brought the violations to its attention.

Pointing to the behind-the-scenes activity and data processing that gets loaded into innocent-looking apps, IDAC highlighted three SDKs in particular used by the app developers: the Unity 3D and game engine, Umeng (an Alibaba-owned analytics provider known as the “Flurry of China” that some have described also as an adware provider) and Appodeal (another app monetization and analytics provider) — as the source of the issues.

Palfrey explained that the problem lies in how the data that the apps were able to access by way of the SDKs could be linked up with other kinds of data, such as geolocation information.

IDAC, which was launched in April 2020 as a spin-off of the Future of Privacy Forum, has also carried out investigations into data privacy violations on fertility apps and COVID-19 trackers, and earlier this week it also published findings on data leakage from an older version of Twitter’s MoPub SDK affecting millions of users