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New Mexico: AG Hector Balderas announces settlements with Google on children's online privacy
The New Mexico Attorney General ('AG') Hector Balderas announced, on 13 December 2021, settlements with Google LLC on children's online privacy where the AG Consumer & Environmental Protection Division has resolved two federal court cases filed against Google, both of which concerned allegations under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 ('COPPA'), as well as under state consumer protection laws.
Furthermore, according to the announcement, Google must, among other things:
- create and fund the Google New Mexico Kids Initiative, where the initiative must set funds for efforts to promote education, privacy, and safety for children;
- work together with the AG in the coming weeks to identify recipients of these funds;
- facilitate the use of the Workspace for Education products, formerly GSuite for Education, where Google now provides school administrators with tools to protect students from the improper collection of their personal data;
- provide access settings to ensure that children's data is protected from unauthorised collection and disclosure;
- ensure that the New Mexico schools will get early access to new products and initiatives as part of the Google for Education Pilot Program;
- ensure that Google's Play Store will take a much more active role in policing app developers that mislabel their child-directed apps in an effort to make more money from targeted advertising and user profiling;
- enact a number of reforms, including a requirement that apps implement age screening measures to ensure that these apps do not collect information from children under the age of 13; and
- increasing parents' visibility into what information apps are collecting from their children.
You can read the announcement here.