What Kids Apps Collect About Your Child (and How to Check)
Last spring I installed a free counting game on my daughter's tablet, the kind with dancing animals and a lot of confetti. Within about a minute the app had asked for her location and popped an ad for a different game made by a company I'd never heard of. She's six. She does not have anywhere to be. That little moment is what kids app data privacy is really about, and most parents never see the part that happens behind the glass.
I've built software for fifteen years, including a math app for my own kids. So I want to tell you what these apps actually collect, why they bother, and how you can check any app in about five minutes without a computer science degree.
What "collect" actually means
When people hear an app collects data, they picture a name and a birthday sitting in a spreadsheet. It's usually broader than that. Here's the kind of thing a typical free kids app can pull, often without anyone reading it out loud to you:
- A device identifier, which is a long code that follows the tablet around even after you delete the app
- Rough location, sometimes from GPS, sometimes just guessed from your internet connection
- What you tap, how long you stay, which screens you skip
- The other apps installed on the device, in some cases
- Crash reports, which sound harmless and mostly are, but can carry more than you'd expect
None of that requires your kid to type anything. The device hands most of it over quietly. And the reason is almost always the same. The app is free because your child's attention, and the data trail that comes with it, is the actual product being sold.
Why a free app wants any of this
Making an app costs real money. Servers, artists, the person answering support email. If nobody pays up front, the money has to come from somewhere, and the two usual sources are ads and data brokers.
Ad networks pay more when they can target. An anonymous kid watching a video is worth a little. A kid tagged as "six years old, likes animal games, in a household that also uses three other paid apps" is worth more. That profile gets built from exactly the crumbs I listed above. This is legal in a lot of cases, though there's a US law called COPPA that's supposed to put guardrails around data from kids under thirteen. Some companies follow it carefully. Some treat the fine as a cost of doing business. You can't tell which from the cheerful icon.
I'm not saying every free app is shady. Plenty are made by decent people. I'm saying the business model pushes hard in one direction, and you should assume that pressure exists until an app proves otherwise.
The five-minute check before you install
You don't need to trust my read on it. Both app stores now make you a decent amount of information, if you know where to look.
On an iPhone or iPad, scroll down the App Store listing to the section called "App Privacy." It shows categories like "Data Used to Track You" and "Data Linked to You." A kids counting game that lists location, identifiers, and usage under tracking is telling you something. A game that says "Data Not Collected" is making a much cleaner promise, and one they can be held to.
On Android, open the Play Store listing and find "Data safety." Same idea. It spells out what's collected, whether it's shared with other companies, and whether you can ask them to delete it.
Read those labels the way you'd read a nutrition panel. You're not memorizing every line. You're scanning for the stuff that doesn't belong. A drawing app that wants your contacts, a math game that needs your precise location, a sticker book that shares data with advertisers. Those are the mismatches worth pausing on.
After it's installed, check the permissions
Labels tell you what a company claims. Permissions tell you what the app can actually reach right now. This is the part I wish more parents knew about, because it takes two minutes and it's where the real control lives.
On an iPhone, open Settings, then Privacy and Security. You can go category by category, Location and Microphone and so on, and see the full list of apps that have asked for each one. On Android, open Settings, then look for the Permission Manager under Privacy or Apps.
Here's the useful part. Most of these you can just switch off, and the app keeps working fine. A math game does not need the microphone. A puzzle app does not need location. If you turn something off and the app genuinely breaks, you can always turn it back on. I do this pass every couple of months on my kids' tablet, usually while the coffee's brewing, and I'm always surprised by one or two things that quietly turned themselves back on after an update.
What I actually do at home
I'm not precious about screens. My kids use a tablet. But I treat the tablet like a device that talks to strangers, because that's what it is.
A few habits that have held up:
- I lean toward paid apps for the things they use a lot. Paying eight bucks once is often the cheapest way to not be the product.
- I keep location off for everything that isn't a map.
- I read the privacy label before installing, not after. Ten seconds of scanning saves the harder conversation later.
- I delete apps we stopped using. A dead app still sits there collecting if you leave it.
When I built our own math app, I made a rule that it collects nothing from a kid it doesn't strictly need to run. That's not marketing, it's just the version I'd want on my own daughter's tablet. Not every developer draws the line there, which is exactly why the checks above matter.
You will not catch everything. The system isn't built to make this easy, and honestly it's not supposed to be. But five minutes of looking puts you ahead of almost everyone, and it teaches your kid, eventually, that the confetti is not free. Somebody's paying for it, and it's worth knowing who.