YouTube may face billions in fines if FTC confirms child privacy violations

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/08/youtube-may-face-billions-in-fines-if-ftc-confirms-child-privacy-violations/

by Bender • 3 years ago

64 18 3 years ago

arstechnica.com

Eji1700• 3 years ago

They absolutely should. They won't, but they should.

A lot of the modern megacorps basically made their money by ignoring laws that were put in place to prevent farming the younger generation, and yet here we are.

bushbaba• 3 years ago

YouTube has child influencers with targeted product placement. E.g. Ryan Toy Review

nicce2• 3 years ago

Where is opportunity, there is money maker

nickthegreek• 3 years ago

Should it?

constantly• 3 years ago

I’m no “but won’t someone think of the children” and try to evaluate each case individually, and frequently disagree that something should be done for children’s’ sake. However YouTube, TikTok, etc have severely violated privacy and I think should be pounded with the hammer of the law through fines.

brucethemoose2• 3 years ago

I dunno, the case better be airtight.

The FTC can't afford to chase another technical red herring.

kmeisthax3• 3 years ago

makes completely false claims and draws uninformed conclusions based solely on the presence of cookies, which are widely used in these contexts for the purposes of fraud detection and frequency capping—both of which are permitted under COPPA

Anyone who's an expert at COPPA know if this is true? The weirdest thing IMO would be if the FTC specifically insisted that kids need to be able to ballot-stuff view counts and run DDoS attacks against Google.

stingraycharles• 3 years ago

Of all the things social media platforms are violating children's privacy with, fraud detection and frequency capping -- effectively ensuring the same person doesn't see the same ad repetitively -- is among the least of the concerns.

If this is indeed solely the reason the FTC believes children's privacy is violated, it's a really poor choice.

whoknowswhat11• 3 years ago

And of all the predations on the net - it’s wild THIS is what the ftc goes after. How about non age gated / warned gore and porn? How is that no a violation?

tadfisher• 3 years ago

You may have missed the first two-thirds of the article.

The FTC has not announced anything; there are four trade groups who have performed investigations and have sent reports of potential COPPA violations to the FTC.

The allegations are specifically that YouTube is serving targeted ads to children in violation of their consent decree with the FTC (for previous COPPA violations).

The statement from Fairplay that YouTube says is a misunderstanding of cookies follows:

YouTube and Google have agreed to ensure that, every time a video is uploaded to YouTube by a content creator, the content creator will have to designate the video as child-directed or not. For videos designated as child-directed, YouTube will not serve behavioral advertisements or track persistent identifiers. ... If YouTube does then serve behavioral advertisements using persistent identifiers or otherwise engage in tracking for such content, it will have violated both COPPA and the order.

chongli• 3 years ago

It really should be trillions at this point. Fines are just a cost of doing business for these companies.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 3 years ago

Here is the report from Adalytics which was confirmed by Fairplay

https://adalytics.io/blog/are-youtube-ads-coppa-compliant

peyton• 3 years ago

Pretty damning if Google is farming personalized ad clicks from children and hiding granular placement information from ad buyers. There would appear to be a large financial incentive to do so.

proxiful-wash• 3 years ago

fucking great, now maybe we can hold them accountable for leaking our PII to creepy advertisers that follow you around with a slew of creepy adds.

YouTube may face billions in fines if FTC confirms child privacy violations

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