United Kingdom: Published Children’s Code compliance guidelines for game designers including data protection recommendations

On 15 February 2023, the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) published guidelines for game designers on how to comply with the Children's Code 2021. The guidelines highlight that children's personal data should only be processed in ways that are not detrimental to their health or well-being. To this end, the guidelines contain recommendations for games designers, such as ensuring that all optional uses of personal data are off by default and only activated after consent is obtained from the player or their parent or guardian, providing age-appropriate explanations to players and prompts at the point they try to change any privacy settings. Furthermore, the guidelines state that developers should notify parents or guardians about changes to privacy settings, introduce variable settings that allow children to control what personal data is visible to other players, not use nudge techniques to lead children to make poor privacy decisions and restrict marketing to contextual advertising that doesn't process children's data.