A lawsuit accusing Google of breaking America’s child privacy laws will proceed to trial as a judge denied the web goliath’s motion to throw out the case.
Filed in June last year, the suit alleges Google ignored state child privacy laws in California, Florida, and New York, which prohibit targeted advertising to children under the age of 13 and collecting their data.
Specifically, the suit is going after Google for setting up a program in 2015 called Designed for Families (DFF). That essentially allowed developers to declare their apps were all above board regarding advertising to children and that only appropriate content would be shown. Apps verified as such by the DFF program would be presented to parents in the Google Play store as safe for kids.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A lawsuit accusing Google of breaking America’s child privacy laws will proceed to trial as a judge denied the web goliath’s motion to throw out the case.
Filed in June last year, the suit alleges Google ignored state child privacy laws in California, Florida, and New York, which prohibit targeted advertising to children under the age of 13 and collecting their data.
The key thing here is that if developers told Google their apps were primarily intended for under-13s, they would not be allowed to use those kids’ data and target them with behavioral advertising.
The Chrome giant responded by filing a motion to dismiss the suit entirely, with part of their argument [PDF] being that the complaint was simply invalid.
District Judge Casey Pitts, however, was not very sympathetic to the search engine giant’s arguments, and on Tuesday denied the motion to dismiss, writing [PDF] that pretty much everything the Google legal team argued to get the case tossed out was wrong.
Consequently, Judge Pitts said the tech giant can’t set the date of the supposed unlawful actions to September 2018 (when it removed Tiny Lab from the Google Play Store) or beforehand, because the DFF program was only axed in 2021 after the mega-corp settled a lawsuit brought by the New Mexico state government, and 2021 is well within the statute of limitations.
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