A new report released by child safety groups Heat Initiative and ParentsTogether Action details the disturbing presence of inappropriate apps rated as suitable for children as young as four on Apple’s App Store. The groups worked with a researcher to review as many apps as possible over a 24-hour period, and say they eventually found more than 200 apps that contained “unsafe content or features” given the age for which they were intended – including stranger chat apps and apps with artificial intelligence, gaming apps with sexual or violent prompts and images, and apps with artificial intelligence-based appearance scoring. Engadget has reached out to Apple for comment and will update this article when we hear back.
The study focused on apps with age ratings of 4+, 9+, and 12+ in categories considered “risky”: chat (including artificial intelligence and stranger chat apps), beauty, diet and weight loss, unfiltered internet access (apps to access banned school sites), and games. The report states that at least 24 sexual games and 9 apps for chatting with strangers were noted as suitable for children in these age groups. The study also found 40 apps for unfiltered Internet access and 75 apps related to beauty, fitness, and weight loss that have the same age ratings, as well as 28 shooting and crime games. According to the Heat Initiative, a total of about 200 illegal apps identified during the 24-hour study were downloaded more than 550 million times.
A total of about 800 apps were checked, and the study found that some categories were more likely than others to contain apps with unacceptably low age ratings. Regarding stranger chat and gaming apps, “fewer of them were rated as suitable for children,” the report says. In most cases, they were 17+. But in the categories of weight loss and unfiltered internet access, “almost all of the apps reviewed were approved for children 4+.” The report’s authors call on Apple to improve safety measures for children in the App Store, urging the company to engage third-party reviewers to verify the age ratings of apps before they become available for download, and to make the process of determining age ratings transparent to consumers. The full text of the report “Rotten Ratings: 24 Hours in Apple’s App Store” is available here.
