Yelp is paying $450,000 to settle a dispute with U.S. regulators over the fact that the service collected names and email addresses from children.
The children found to be as young as 9 years old, and the data was collected without parents consent. The collection of data was due to a bug in its mobile registation system that Yelp said it had removed.
"Only about 0.02 percent of users who actually completed Yelp's registration process during this time period provided an underage birth date, and we have good reason to believe that many of them were actually adults," said Yelp in a blog post.
Yelp has said that the problem is fixed and that affected user's accounts have been closed. The company was also ordered not to disclose any information and to submit a compliance report that details methods on how to obtain parents' consent to gather minors' information.
Yelp is not the only company to be accused of collecting children's information. Mobile game developer TinyCo has also settled with the Federal Trade Commission after being accused of doing much the same thing. TinyCo settled the dispute for $300,000.
"Companies should take steps as they build and test their apps to make sure that children's information won't be collected without a parent's consent," said Jessica Rich, director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the FTC.
TinyCo has also released a statement about the settlement, outlining exactly what the company plans to do to comply with Children's Online Privacy Protection Act laws going forward.
"Today TinyCo settled with the FTC over COPPA violations in some of our older games. We have worked with the FTC to correct these issues, and have removed all email addresses collected by our old in-game social identity system, some of which may have belonged to children under the age of 13," said TinyCo in the statement.
The news comes after Google recently settled with the FTC for $19 million after failing to provide authentication systems for in-app purchases, meaning that children could make in-app purchases without parental consent. Apple settled a case involving the same situation on the Apple store in January for $32.5 million.
Amazon is currently fighting the FTC's claims against its own app store.
Yelp's privacy policy states that the app is not aimed at children under the age of 13, but the company failed to notify parents of the issue. Like TinyCo, Yelp is required to delete all the information that it collected about children.
