The ICO has announced that it will be scrutinising how popular games played by children
protect online privacy. 90% of UK children play games on digital devices and the ICO will be
launching a monitoring programme targeting 10 popular mobile games. The review will
assess games’ compliance with default privacy settings, their geolocation controls and their
targeted advertising practices.
The ICO’s research has shown 84% of parents are concerned about their children’s
potential exposure to strangers or harmful content through mobile games, with 50% who
stated they were ‘very concerned’. 30% said that children had stopped using a mobile
games because either the parent or child were concerned about data collected or how this
was used.
The ICO’s focus on mobile games is following significant progress in improving children’s
privacy standards across social media and video-sharing platforms through its Children’s
code strategy. The ICO has reported that its intervention has resulted in these platforms
making changes to better their data protection practices, improving online privacy for up to
11.7 million UK children.
Since March 2025, it has secured improvements or confirmed good practice to ten platforms’ approach to children’s privacy settings. These include setting private profiles by default, just-in-times privacy notices and restricted visibility of child users.
The ICO has started engagement with Snap and Meta about their processing of children’s
geolocation data and has issued notices of intent to impose monetary penalties on MediaLab
and Reddit from its investigations into how the platforms use UK children’s personal
information and age assurance measures. It has also announced it will start a monitoring
programme to encourage the adoption of more substantial and proportionate age assurance
methods on high-risk platforms.
