Children’s online privacy in mobile games under spotlight

1 Dec 2025 02:42 PM

We yesterday announced that we will be scrutinising how popular mobile games played by children in the UK protect their online privacy.

With around 90% of UK children playing games on digital devices, we will launch a monitoring programme targeting 10 popular mobile games. The review will assess the games’ compliance with default privacy settings, their geolocation controls, and their targeted advertising practices. It will also consider any other privacy issues identified during the review process.

Our new research reveals 84% of parents are concerned about their children’s potential exposure to strangers or harmful content through mobile games, including half (50%) who are ‘very concerned’.

Three in four parents also say they are concerned about their children sharing personal data (76%) and data collection by game companies to serve ads (75%).

Meanwhile, 30% say their children have stopped using a mobile game because they – the parent/carer or child – were concerned about the data the game collected, or how the information was used.

The focus on mobile games follows significant progress in improving children’s privacy standards across social media and video-sharing platforms through our Children’s code strategy.

Our intervention has resulted in social media and video sharing platforms making changes to improve their data protection practices. These changes have already reached over three million children, with the potential to improve online privacy for up to 11.7 million children in the UK.

John Edwards, UK Information Commissioner, yesterday said:

“Children’s online experiences are shaped not just by social media and video sharing platforms, but also by the games they play.

“Our early review suggests that many mobile games’ design features can be especially intrusive, raising important questions about how these games are designed and experienced, and their adherence to the ICO’s Children’s code standards.

“We’re expanding our strategy to ensure that mobile games meet the same high standards of data protection we’ve driven across other platforms.”

Making a difference to children’s online privacy

Since our March 2025 update, we have:

secured improvements or confirmed good practice to 10 platforms’ approach to children’s privacy settings, including on Twitch, Viber and Hoop. Changes involve setting private profiles by default, just-in-time privacy notices and restricted visibility of child users.
started engagement with Snap and Meta regarding their processing of children’s geolocation data, particularly the compliance of their map functions on Snapchat and Instagram.
issued notices of intent to impose monetary penalties on MediaLab (Imgur) and Reddit from our investigations into how both platforms use UK children’s personal information and age assurance measures;
reviewed the age assurance practices of 17 platforms popular with children in the UK, including Discord, Pinterest and X, and will start a monitoring programme to drive the adoption of more robust and proportionate age assurance methods on high-risk platforms.