The Walt Disney Co. secretly collects personal information about its customers, small and shares it with advertisers without the permission of parents. A similar Federal lawsuit was filed last week in California.
Application developers for Disney and three other companies claim that the mobile applications that they are co-created, breaking the law: they gather information about users of the applications via the Internet. Many of these users are under the age of 13.
The plaintiffs argue that Disney and partners violated COPPA, the Law on the protection of children’s privacy on the Internet. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District court for the district of Northern California, requires a fine for Disney, and also an injunction to the collection and disclosure by companies of personal data without the consent of the parents.
The lawsuit alleges that Disney allowed developers to embed trackers in applications such as «Disney Princess Palace Pets» and «Where’s My Water? 2». According to the lawsuit, the software after installation, you may filter out personal information from the device for use in advertising and other commercial purposes.
This is not the first case when Disney faced judicial proceedings regarding alleged violations of COPPA. In 2011, the FTC fined a subsidiary of the company Playdom for $ 3 million after it was discovered that Playdom has registered for the online games around 1.2 million users, most of whom were children. The FTC says in the lawsuit that Disney has collected e-mail addresses and ages of the children and allowed to voluntarily provide information such as full names of children and the physical location during the online games.
Games app Disney is very popular. According to market Google Play, the app «Where’s my Water? 2» was set from 100 to 500 million times, and «Moana Island Life» – from 1 to 5 million times.
