Smart Sheriff is a popular app that launched in South Korea and aims to monitor children's online activities.
The Korean Communications Commission (KCC) has removed the app from the Google Play store and is advising users who are already using it to find alternatives.
South Korea issued a mandate in April that all children's phones should be monitored.
However, the regulator said the decision to suspend the application was made before the release of a Catapult report on its safety.
KCC told the agency that the decision was made because of the abundance of free apps now available.
Smart Sheriff had been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times domestically and was created by a group of telecommunications companies known as the Korean Mobile Internet Business Association (Moiba).
Two reports were published, one by the University of Toronto and the other by software Cure53, describing the security offered by Smart Sheriff as “disastrous.”
The report's authors found that children's personal information was not stored securely and that the parental filters implemented were easy to disable.
“The Smart Sheriff is the kind of babysitter who leaves the doors unlocked and throws parties where everyone is invited,” said independent researcher Colin Anderson, who worked on the report, at the time.
Moiba said the vulnerabilities had already been patched by the time the report was released.
