Software maker secretly sold children's chats to marketers, NY AG says

Updated
computer privacy, girl in green glasses looking at computer
computer privacy, girl in green glasses looking at computer

Echometrix, a leading software company that sells child monitoring programs to parents, crossed the line when it tried to package portions of Internet chats between users it has secretly collected and sell them to third-party advertisers, the New York Attorney General said.

New York-based Echometrix began offering a program last year to marketers interested in learning what people were saying about their products and services online. The program, called Pulse, mined and analyzed recorded conversations stored through the company monitoring software, but it did not tell consumers it was sharing the data.

"Echometrix sells software that protects children by gathering information for parents about what their kids are doing online, but at the same time it was marketing its data to outside companies without its customers' knowledge," Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said in a statement.

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