AgeCheq, the company that has helped mobile app and game publishers comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) over the past year, today announced new infrastructure improvements, bolstering its system in light of last week’s public COPPA enforcement actions by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The AgeCheq compliance cloud service was designed to scale to support real-time COPPA compliance for the entire mobile game industry. As interest in AgeCheq from app and game publishers grows, AgeCheq is scaling its cloud-based compliance infrastructure to process more than 1 billion app starts per day by January 1, 2015.
On September 16, 2014, the FTC announced mobile app developers Yelp and TinyCo each settled COPPA 2.0 violation cases. Both companies’ apps collected personally identifiable information from children under 13 without seeking advance permission from the parents of the children. These actions have called COPPA into sharp focus for all publishers of mobile apps and games and, as a result, AgeCheq has seen an immediate spike in interest in compliance from those with the biggest risk: top-tier publishers with hundreds of millions of installed users.
“The issue of protecting the privacy of our nation’s children as they use mobile games reached a tipping point this month as the FTC revealed its first developer settlements under COPPA 2.0,” said Roy Smith, AgeCheq CEO. “As written, the law would force each publisher to create a complex relationship with each parent whose children play a game. AgeCheq’s solution dramatically reduces the cost and effort required for a developer to bring their game into compliance. Parents also benefit from AgeCheq’s single sign-on dashboard that minimizes their effort to curate their child’s privacy.”
Since the FTC suits, publishers with tens to hundreds of millions of users have contacted the company, each asking the same basic question: “Can your system really handle all of my game’s users?”
“We designed our cloud infrastructure to massively scale in support of the millions of app starts we will see as top games use our compliance service,” added Smith. “Today, our backend can comfortably handle 5,000 app starts per second, which translates to over 430 million app starts per day. By the beginning of 2015, we’ll be able to process over 1 billion app starts per day.”
With AgeCheq, publishers can easily comply with COPPA by creating a developer account, then adding a few lines of code to each of their games using the company’s native SDKs for iOS, Android, Unity, Corona or HTML5. Existing games can be updated, tested and re-posted to the app stores within a single day. App and game publishers of any size wishing to avoid legal fees, fines, and annual privacy audits that face COPPA violators can learn more about AgeCheq’s COPPA compliance cloud service at www.AgeCheq.com.
About AgeCheq
AgeCheq is a leading provider of cloud-based privacy disclosure, compliance and management services for mobile app and game publishers. AgeCheq’s COPPA service fulfills the industry’s need for a single sign-on “common consent mechanism” that allows parents and publishers to comply with the law in a streamlined way. As the mobile industry’s premier CaaS (compliance as a service) provider, AgeCheq offers app publishers a frictionless path to make their apps and games COPPA compliant, at no cost. For parents, AgeCheq provides a single point of contact where they can easily see, and approve or disapprove, of what is going on behind the scenes in the apps their children use. AgeCheq is platform-agnostic and can be integrated into an existing app and tested within a day. For more information visit www.AgeCheq.com.
