Mobile game developer TinyCo apologizes to the feds for improper marketing toward children

Mobile game developer TinyCo is sorry.

The San Francisco-based iOS and Android studio settled with the Federal Trade Commission yesterday and apologized for its transgression. TinyCo paid a $300,000 fine for violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. The feds said the studio was marketing its games, such as Tiny Monsters and Tiny Village, to kids under 13 — and collecting their personal identifications, a no-no under law.

While Yelp was also hit for $450,000 in the same COPPA enforcement action and blamed the snafu on a system “bug,” TinyCo chalked its mistakes what it called a “social identity system” problem that, in turn, clouded its email collection protocols where people register for games.

The feds said kids playing TinyCo offerings accrued what are called in-game currencies, or virtual goods, that enabled them to move up the games’ ladder. TinyCo permitted this to happen while collecting PIs, or personal identifiers, from kids 13 and younger. The investigation began over a year ago.

TinyCo put out a blog post on the issue, and its outside PR spokeswomen pointed me to it. It read, in part:

“This was an infraction with our social identity system, developed in 2010, and how it implemented email collection in older titles. Some of these titles were deemed to be “child directed with a general audience” under the FTC’s rules.TinyCo fully supports COPPA and the FTC’s effort to protect the privacy and data of children online. We apologize to anyone affected by this issue, and want to be unequivocal in stating that TinyCo is fully committed to protecting user privacy, particularly when children are involved.”

The fine isn’t the only hit that the game studio took. TinyCo must scrub its servers of all data relating to kids under 13 and are on a kind of probation, having to check in with COPPA overseers to show that it is in compliance and also sending a report to the FTC in one year outlining how the company is behaving with regard to COPPA compliance. Yelp must do the same.

In the meantime, TinyCo has been busy appeasing the feds — at least according to its blog post. It has incorporated what it’s calling “oversight” of product development to ensure that it gives more time to assess whether its games are marketed directly at kids and evolving and additional safeguards to ensure all products are COPPA-compliant. TinyCo has also revised its privacy policy.

The FTC has been threatening to make good on its promise to begin enforcing COPPA, especially in the mobile gaming sector. That promise now rings true.