Welcome to Pixalate’s CTV & Mobile App Manual Reviews According to COPPA, a series containing the detailed factors the Trust & Safety Advisory Board educators used to assess an app’s child-directedness.
The educators manually review thousands of mobile apps available in the Google Play & Apple App Stores as well as connected TV (CTV) apps from the Roku Channel Store and Amazon Fire TV App Store using the COPPA Rule factors shown below & make those results available to the public at ratings.pixalate.com.
This post takes a look at a popular mobile app (1 million+ downloads) from the Google Play Store. Our reviewer discusses how the subjective factors set forth in the COPPA Rule apply to the app and factor into the reviewer's determination as to whether the app is child-directed or general audience (i.e., it is not targeting children).
The teacher will indicate the factors they relied upon in their assessment using the 10 factors shown below that reflect the 10 child-directed factors in the COPPA Rule.
Cat Diary: Dress Up Princess gameplay is a unique fashion game that lets the player choose various clothing styles that allow the player to use their creativity to create extremely chic looks. The game itself is fun for kids but some of the outfits can be suggestive. Players will combine charming cats in order to gather outfits by exploring the cat dairy and growing their cat tree. The more cats you merge and complete the achievements in your cat diary the more you unlock rewards for outfits as you progress in the game. The characteristics of the visual content and animation are bright with stunning child-oriented graphics. The language in the About game section says, “princess dress up and cute kittens,” which are keywords that are child-directed.
The goal of the game is to dress up the princesses.
The app is rated E for Everyone in the Google Play store. There is no age gate.
Privacy:
The developer’s privacy policy states, “Dream Tap will never connect with children under 13 years old and gather their information...committed to protecting the user's information, be it yours or your children.”
Screenshots of Cat Diary: Dress Up Princess
Pixalate’s Trust and Safety Advisory Board was created to bring in individuals with experience using child-directed apps in the classroom to review and assess which apps are child-directed. This manual review process serves to quality check Pixalate’s automated review process. See our full methodology for more information.
Disclaimer
This blog post published by Pixalate is available for informational purposes only and is not considered legal advice. By viewing this blog post, the reader understands and agrees that there is no attorney-client relationship between the reader and the blog publisher. The blog should not be used as a substitute for legal advice from a licensed professional attorney in the applicable jurisdiction(s), and readers are urged to consult their own legal counsel on any specific legal questions concerning any specific situation. The content of this blog post reflects Pixalate's opinions with respect to factors that Pixalate believes may be useful to the digital media industry. Pixalate's opinions are just that, opinions, which means that they are neither facts nor guarantees; and this blog post is not intended to impugn the standing or reputation of any entity, person or app, but instead, to report findings pertaining to mobile and Connected TV (CTV) apps.
