COPA compliance

utkiupe

Hey guys,
We are interested in using Flox for a game currently under development
this is a game for kids so privacy is really a sensible matter
in the US the app needs to comply with COPPA. Right now, we are not doing any analytics on our apps, so... no problems.
However, for mostly gamedesign questions we would like some usage stats. So my question is: can we use Flow and still be COPPA compliant?

I guess the most important things are to not have any personal data from user, nor any geolocation. So maybe it's just some setup questions, like the kind of data I'm logging.

I have found some info on another product : http://support.flurry.com/index.php?title=Analytics/FAQ/RestrictedFeatureSet

hope someone can help me found out more informations on how to use flox the correct way and not mess with legal issues.
thanks 🙂

Daniel

Hi,
sorry for the late reply, your message somehow got lost under a pile of others!

I must admit I hadn't heard of COPPA before (probably because we're Europe-based), but that shouldn't be a problem with Flox. If you look at the feature comparison from the Flurry website, you see that Flurry normally collects all kinds of data (gender, age, etc.) that we do not track -- that is, that we not even would know how to track! 😉

E.g. Flox does not use any device identifiers. Instead, we create an "installationID" that's totally random and anonymous and is lost when the user deletes the app.
The only geographic data we collect is the country of the user.

So, the the best of our knowledge, Flox should be COPPA compliant. Reading through the Wikipedia article shows that you might make some special considerations in your app, e.g. describing yourself via a privacy policy that you (both via Flox or otherwise) don't collect such information.

Does that answer your question?

utkiupe

Thank you Daniel.
My company is also in Europe, but we sell a lot in the US, so of course it's an important issue 🙂
I have the same intuition so yes, it seems compliant because we do not track these informations, but it might be also interesting for you, and the people who use Flox, to add some information about that on your FAQ.
We want to be as transparent as possible with our customers. So we have a privacy policy page, where we can mention the analytics solution we are using. We can also link to this page where you explain how it is COPPA compliant.

BTW, starling rocks!