Subway Surfers Collection of Children’s Data for Commercial Use Class Action

This class action is brought by the parents of children who played the game Subway Surfer via Smartphone apps. The complaint alleges that the game’s design enabled its developers and their partners to extract the children’s personally identifying information, then sell this information to third parties who sell online advertising. This practice, the complaint points out, is forbidden under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

Subway Surfers is an extremely popular game, which has been downloaded more than a billion times, but the complaint alleges that the developers are using similar tracking techniques in other games.

The classes for this action include

• A multi-state class (covering Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia)
• A California subclass of the multi-state class
• A New York class

Each of the classes covers children who were younger than 13 when they played the game tracking apps, and their parents and legal guardians, from whom defendants collected, used, or disclosed personal information without verifiable parental consent.

The defendants in this case are (1) the two developers of the game, Kiloo and Sybo, both companies headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, and (2) “the SDK defendants,” ten companies which provided “software development kits” or proprietary code for the developers to use in creating the game. The complaint claims that the SDK defendants embedded blocks of code in their SDK that collect data while children play online games, such as “persistent identifiers” (a number linked to a specific mobile device) and a chronology of a child’s action across different apps.

According to the complaint, COPPA was passed to protect children’s privacy while they are online and to prohibit the collection of data of children under the age of thirteen without verifiable consent from their parents. The data includes traditional personal data, such as names, e-mail addresses, and social security numbers but also more recent types of data such as “persistent identifiers” and geolocation. The FTC has set forth acceptable methods for obtaining verifiable parental consent, such as calling a staffed, toll-free number.

The complaint points out that children are particularly vulnerable to such targeted advertising, because their brains are still developing and they have limited ability to recognize and resist advertising techniques. 

Article Type: Lawsuit
Topic: Consumer
Tags: COPPA Violations, Children/Minors, Electronic Games, Entertainment