COPPA compliance

The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA) requires that apps must not collect any personal information from children under 13 without parental consent. This also applies to included third party SDKs, such as the AppBrain SDK. For more information on COPPA, and whether your app is affected by it, please refer to the COPPA FAQ.

The AppBrain SDK provides a COPPA compliancy mode. If COPPA compliancy is enabled, the AppBrain SDK removes any personal information from its requests. Note that unique identifiers are still sent to our servers for the allowed purposes of frequency capping and fraud analysis. All unique identifiers are deleted within 10 days, are not used for behavioral targeting, and are never passed on to third parties.

COPPA compliancy mode in the SDK can be enabled in one of the following ways:

Android Manifest

You can indicate that your app is directed to children in your AndroidManifest.xml. This enables COPPA compliancy for all SDK requests, and is thus the preferred way to enable COPPA compliancy for child directed apps, as they need to enforce the additional privacy constraints for all users, regardless of their age.

Enable COPPA compliancy by adding the following line to your AndroidManifest.xml inside the <application> tag:

<meta-data
    android:name="appbrain.child_directed"
    android:value="true" />

Programmatically enable COPPA compliance

You can programmatically enable child directed treatment if you know that a certain installation or use of your app falls under the COPPA rule (e.g. if you know that your app is installed on a child’s device), by calling AppBrain.getAds().tagForChildDirectedTreatment(true). Most likely you want to call this in Application.onCreate().

Explicitly indicate the user’s age

By calling AppBrain.getAds().setUserData() you can explicitly inform the SDK about your current user’s age. For users under 13 years, COPPA compliancy is automatically enabled if either the SIM-card or the carrier-network is based in the US. Note that this automatic detection might not be enough to make your app COPPA compliant. We thus recommend to always explicitly enable COPPA compliancy, as described above, when dealing with users that fall under the COPPA rule.