The fintech company Greenlight says that its app and debit card for kids is a financial literacy tool that gives parents “superpowers” t

Debit Card Apps for Kids Are Collecting a Shocking Amount of Personal Data

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2021-07-07 12:30:10

The fintech company Greenlight says that its app and debit card for kids is a financial literacy tool that gives parents “superpowers” to set strict controls on their children’s spending. Parents can use the app to pay allowances, choose which stores the connected debit cards work at, set spending limits, and receive instant notifications whenever their child makes a purchase.

But there’s one thing Greenlight makes it very hard for parents to control: What the company does with the mountains of sensitive data it collects about children.

Greenlight reserves the right to share that personal information—including names, birth dates, email addresses, GPS location history, purchase history, and behavioral profiles—with “ad and marketing vendors,” “insurance companies,” “collection agencies,” and the catch-all category of “other service providers,” according to its privacy policy . Greenlight’s policy also says that it can use the data it collects to deliver “tailored content” advertisements, a kind of marketing that youth privacy and education advocates say is particularly manipulative and damaging for children.

“This is extremely concerning,” Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay, a nonprofit that advocates for ad-free childhoods, told Motherboard after reviewing the company’s privacy policy. “Obviously this must be extremely valuable data for the companies that can get their hands on it to understand the spending habits of young people and to target ads based on that information… Children are already much more vulnerable to advertising than adults are.”