Mobile app usage of children in the United States - statistics & facts
Kids love apps as much as adults. The most recent trends in device ownership provided an onboarding occasion for younger mobile audiences, with the result that increased ownership of mobile devices made apps a stable interactive point between children and online environments. In the United States, the number of children between eight and 11 years owning a smartphone has increased from approximately 10 percent in 2015 to 31 percent in 2021.
The 2020 approval of Proposition 24, also known as California Privacy Rights Act or CPRA, added to the rights consumers can advocate for when it comes to their data, including the right to delete personal information previously collected, and the right to revoke consent for data tracking. According to a June 2023 study on companies and digital products for children and families, 13 percent of companies still present an unclear picture of their practices around data sharing and data selling, while under the CPRA, 62 percent of the companies having to disclose if they sell data to third parties.
It’s screen time: digital consumption among kids
From school to home, digital devices have more and more become a part of childhood, with the time spent in front of screens by children becoming an increasingly problematic and worrisome issue for parents. According to a survey of parents in the United States, around 47 percent of respondents allowed children over three hours of screen time daily in 2022. Despite this, learning environments such as Kahoot! and Duolingo only saw around 14 minutes and 12 minutes of daily engagements from U.S. kids in 2022. In comparison, children in the U.S. spent almost 80 minutes daily using the YouTube app, as well as around 50 minutes on the Netflix app consuming video content.Young users protection and mobile parental controls
As for adults, app usage by children comes with several possible privacy risks. Being a more vulnerable category of users on the internet, U.S. children in the U.S. have been put at the center of several pieces of legislation to protect their online privacy as well as regulate or ban the use of their personal data. Passed first in 1998, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) was drafted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to monitor digital companies enforce the requirements set to protect users under 13 years of age. As of 2023, several high-profile U.S. companies, such as Microsoft and Amazon were hit by heavy fines, with Epic Games’ Fortnite the highest penalty of 520 million U.S. dollars in 2022. In 2019, TikTok (known at the time as Musical.ly) was fined 5.7 million U.S. dollars for not doing enough to prevent usage by 13-year-olds, while YouTube received a fine of approximately 170 million U.S. dollars during the same year.The 2020 approval of Proposition 24, also known as California Privacy Rights Act or CPRA, added to the rights consumers can advocate for when it comes to their data, including the right to delete personal information previously collected, and the right to revoke consent for data tracking. According to a June 2023 study on companies and digital products for children and families, 13 percent of companies still present an unclear picture of their practices around data sharing and data selling, while under the CPRA, 62 percent of the companies having to disclose if they sell data to third parties.
