• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, December 29, 2014

The popular BabyBus apps appear to violate children's privacy laws, the Federal Trade Commission warns in a letter to the Chinese-based developer of the apps.

“Several of your apps appear to collect precise geolocation information that is transmitted to third parties, including advertising networks and/or analytics companies,” Maneesha Mithal, associate director in FTC's division of privacy and identity protection, says in a letter to BabyBus Network Technology Co., based in Fuzhou City. The letter, dated Dec. 17, was made public last week.

BabyBus, which markets dozens of apps for toddlers and young children, makes its products available through Google's Play store, Apple's iTunes and Amazon's Appstore for Android.

As of Monday, the apps weren't available through Google Play.

BabyBus says that its app account was frozen by Google as a result of the FTC's letter. “The incident occurred around Christmas and New Year, so we couldn't reach Google's related departments to update our products,” the company says in a statement that pops up on the site's English-language home page.

BabyBus added that it will bring its apps into compliance with U.S. laws. The company also said that GPS information was only gathered from users of the Android app; BabyBus attributed the data collection to “Android’s third party statistics software plug-in.”

“At the moment our products have been corrected and are ready to be released. We will also report to the FTC about the progress,” BabyBus added.

The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act prohibits Web site operators, app developers and online ad networks from collecting personal information from children under 13 without their parents' consent. The FTC recently defined personal information to include precise geolocation data, like GPS coordinates.

Mithal says in the letter that the children's privacy regulations apply to foreign sites and services that “are involved in commerce in the United States.”