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Comment by halisaurus | Hacker News Reader

I come from the other side of the glass. My toddlers have iPads and constantly tap ads that are usually larger than real, in-app actions. Often the ads are interstitial between two game screens, or float next to the content they are interested in. Besides being frustrating for the kids, I have to be vigilant on the content of the ads they're seeing. From my experience, the ads are not always appropriate for kids. I really wish Apple would offer a "No Ads in Kids Apps" policy.

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Why sit around wishing that Apple would change the policy? Why not just vet the apps that you're installing? If you are considering a free app, it's probably going to have either (a) ads or (b) persistent in app purchase nags. There are lots of good kids apps with neither (check the Toca Boca catalog for instance) but they might set you back as much as $1-3.

This is the approach I took. If the developer offered an adds free app I would gladly pay for it not to have to deal with "Daddy, the iPad is broken." only to find that Safari had launched and taken her away from her game.

Now that she is old enough to read and some of the game apps she has used her money to buy prompt her to upgrade I just tell her we don't do in app upgrades and she is very adept at dismissing the prompts. Fwiw - Toca Boca apps are great. I still see her playing them occasionally although in the past few months her interest in digital games has really fallen off and she wants to play some of the board games or hide-and-seek instead.

This could be a reasonable class action lawsuit: both against advertisers collecting personal information from children (whether they intended to or not) and from platforms serving inappropriate ads to children.

very stringent rules around children's data in europe I believe

I think that Europe does not have class action suits. I'm not 100% sure. Anyway, USA has special laws around collecting and storing data of kids under 13 years old.

That is primary reason why facebook like companies tos excludes them. It is safe to assume that ad companies do not follow requirements written in these laws.

How are the collecting personal information, and how are the ads inappropriate?

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