King / Candy Crush: Privacy & Security Findings

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Permanent Disclosure Ledger

The discipline, demonstrated

On behalf of our research partners, we investigate publicly distributed Android and iOS apps: we decompile them, follow their code and data flows, and trace every connection to the servers it reaches. Hundreds of agents work through each app and join the technical evidence into one picture, which our specialists then review and verify.

387+
Android/iOS apps audited
Every app is decompiled at source-code level, not just scanned from outside.
1.04M+
Smali classes read
The full shipped code we have actually read, not an estimate.
262+
Critical findings recorded
Confirmed findings copied to regulators, not theoretical risks.
970+
Weak points found
Third-party tracking we have provably found inside the binary.
567+
Endpoints investigated
Real servers and countries where data actually flows.
132+
SDK instances mapped
Reusable libraries correlated across the entire corpus.
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Showing the report for King / Candy Crush.
OrganisationNotifiedStatusSevIntel (click to expand)StatutesResolvedDisclosureElapsedReport
King / Candy Crush
NASDAQ
2026-06-22
94d ago
ACK
Critical
King, the company behind Candy Crush and eleven other games downloaded over 3 billion times, ships a child-safety switch in its ad SDK that is built specifically to stop behavioral profiling of children and never turns it on, across the whole portfolio. When the findings were raised, King answered ten times with the identical automated support message and never once let a human from privacy, legal, or its own data protection office engage with a single finding.
12 apps audited (com.king.candycrushsaga + 11 titles), 3B+ downloads. AppLovin MAX behavioral profiling on PEGI 3 children never age-restricted, a documented choice, CVSS v4.0 base MEDIUM/6.9, held at CRITICAL under blast-radius escalation. Cross-app behavioral graph across all 12 games and a Microsoft-operated consent platform for 3-year-olds both corrected to CVSS-based HIGH. Braze marketing SDK, 12 hardcoded Firebase keys, and a legacy cleartext domain corrected to MEDIUM. replyto.kcare@king.com sent the identical automated reply ten times across 92 days, zero human response from privacy, legal, or DPO. ICO casework@ blocked outright by a Microsoft-side mail rule. Case closed and published 2026-09-24, four days after the 2026-09-20 embargo.
click to expand
GDPR Art. 8GDPR Art. 13GDPR Art. 8
Yes
Closed
Disclosure
94d 00h 00m 00s
Published
PDF

This ledger is updated in real time as companies respond. Silence is public. Severity is scored primarily by CVSS v4.0, we reserve the right to deviate based on blast radius.