NetFamilyNews.orgIn case parents are interested in what the toy and digital industries are thinking about and designing for kids… Digital play that’s both mobile and tactile was the centerpiece of what all the adults were talking about at the Digital Kids conference in New York last week, but their insights were like “frozen concentrate” compared [...]
Only 20% of the 400 children’s apps the FTC analyzed “provided disclosures about their data collection practices,” the New York Times reported today – and the apps that did linked to long, dense privacy policies that few users could comprehend. The Federal Trade Commission’s announcement does not surprise; it’s an update of the Commission’s report [...]
Don’t get me wrong. By blending the most popular elements of mobile technology in a new way, Snapchat is in a separate category – in fact, a category leader like Instagram or Pinterest. But it’s also a little in the Instagram category – photos + text, only with a time element to it (more about [...]
I first heard about this little social-networking giant when my then-14-year-old suddenly seemed to be taking a serious interest in photography. Since then, I’ve come to see Instagram as more like the next Facebook than just another cellphone app (FB was smart to acquire it!). It’s almost game-like because it blends photography and socializing in [...]
The US Federal Trade Commission has turned this week’s wakeup call about mobile-app privacy into a conference call, adding kids’ privacy to the conversation. The title of its just-released report “Mobile Apps for Kids: Current Privacy Disclosures are Disappointing” (that’s the FTC authors’ cute italicization) summarizes the Commission’s conclusions well. But to make their point [...]
I’ve done it, have you? I have a feeling most of us have passed our cellphones back to a kid in the backseat so we could drive in peace while the child (who has been hounding us to let it happen) plays a game app. Of course, increasingly, this is happening with really little kids, [...]
As mobile apps multiply like rabbits and the number of kids downloading and playing with them seems to keep growing, the usefulness of app ratings to parents seems to be growing too. CTIA – the mobile phone industry trade association – gets this. It recently announced an app rating system it has been working on [...]
This is smart. Now, while you’re standing in a store aisle staring at a bunch of videogame titles – or right when your kid’s saying, “That’s it, that’s the game on my list, Mom/Dad!” – you can get details from the game-rating source on the spot, pretending you got a text message (feigning disinterest so [...]
Social networking is rapidly getting more mobile in the US too. I say “too,” because one of my biggest takeaways from attending an international conference in Kenya this fall was that 3G cellphones (what we call “feature phones”) are and will increasingly be the typical way most East Africans access Facebook, Skype, Twitter, etc. But [...]
In the next few weeks, Facebook becomes a little less local in one way. It’s eliminating the Deals feature, Facebook’s answer to the popular Groupon deal-of-the-day-at-a-retailer-near-you service. “The program is being dropped after four months of testing in select markets in Texas, California and Georgia,” the Washington Post reports. This development probably has something to [...]
Sponsor:
Profanity Filter
by Inversoft
