App flap: New York State AG settles case over high school student privacy concerns

A Manhattan-based app developer has agreed to pay $650,000 in penalties after it failed to protect the privacy of its high school-aged users, including on Long Island, by neglecting to verify their ages and email addresses, New York Attorney General Letitia James' office announced Friday.

The software company, Saturn Technologies, also will be required to enhance its privacy settings, hide the personal information of minors until obtaining "informed consent" to the app's new terms, allow teachers to block their personal information and notify users about changes to the app, James' office said.

Of the $650,000 in penalties, $450,000 will be suspended to ensure Saturn’s compliance with the settlement terms.

Saturn is an app launched in 2019 that allows high school students to keep in daily contact with one another. Members can create a personal calendar with their name, photo and biography that can be used to share their location, along with social media links and messages.

"The Saturn app helps students stay up to date with school-related events, sports, exams, and homework, but it failed to protect young users’ safety and privacy," James said in a statement. "Saturn Technologies should have strictly verified users to ensure that they were actually high school students and should have made sure students were interacting with others in their high school, not strangers."

In response, a Saturn spokesperson said Friday its process to bring in new users has evolved in recent years to keep up with growing demand.

"Now, through this cooperative agreement with the New York State Attorney General, we have improved the way we describe our platform, including our onboarding process, to better reflect our functionality," the statement said. "As our community grows, our platform continues to evolve and we have learned how to do a better job of informing our users of changes when they occur."

The app is advertised as only allowing verified users from the same high school to interact with one another. The app, which initially required users to verify their identity using their high school email address, is available in 18,000 schools nationwide, the company said. It is widely available, the AG's office said, to students on Long Island.

But an investigation by the AG's office found that in 2021, the company made email-based member verification optional — using other untested methods to prove a member's identity — and didn't notify its users of the policy change, prosecutors said.

In total, the AG's office said Saturn shut off user verification for more than 4,000 high schools from 2021-2023.

The investigation, James' office said, also found Saturn failed to screen the birth date of new users to verify they were high school-aged until August 2023 and made unauthorized copies of its users' contacts. A spokeswoman for the AG's office said there was no verifiable evidence the app had been accessed and misused by adults.

By Robert Brodsky

robert.brodsky@newsday.com@BrodskyRobert

Robert Brodsky is a breaking news reporter who has worked at Newsday since 2011. He is a Queens College and American University alum.