Today is Safer Internet Day, which is held to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially amongst children and young people across the world. Some interesting research into children’s use of mobile devices has been commissioned this year as part of the awareness campaign – you can read a bit more about it here.
We’ve written before about our approach towards protecting children’s privacy in our apps, but this seemed like a good opportunity to repeat it. It’s pretty simply really: our apps don’t carry any advertising, analytics, or any other method of covert data collection. Our information page (labelled ‘For Grown-ups’, and protected with a parental gate designed to prevent young children from accidentally accessing it) has an option to sign up to our Apps Mailing List (we use MailChimp to store the information securely), Like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter, and that’s all. Our story apps don’t use any form of in-app purchasing: once you’ve bought one of our apps once, you’ve got the whole thing – we won’t pester you to carry on paying for upgrades or add-ons. We have a “More Apps” page, with information about our other apps, and it’s also protected with the parental gate – we don’t take any form of payment through the apps themselves, and in order to buy any of our apps, you’ll need to visit the App Store and enter an iTunes password.
The parental gate in our Jack and the Beanstalk app.
We think getting this stuff right is incredibly important: we want parents, teachers and carers to feel comfortable letting children use our apps, and that means taking every precaution to ensure they can do so without being exposed to anything at all untoward. And we think that approach makes the most sense: we want those parents (and teachers, and carers) to recommend our apps to other people, and we know they’ll only do that if they feel the apps can be trusted.
So happy Safer Internet Day! Be careful online – and if you’d like to find out more about our award-winning apps, you can download our latest fairytale, Jack and the Beanstalk, on the App Store here.
