Google Fined $170 Million For Violating Kids’ Privacy On YouTube

Sep 6, 2019

Google has finally agreed to pay $170 million fine to settle
allegations by the Federal Trade Commission and the New York
attorney general that its YouTube service earned millions by
illegally harvesting personal information from children without
their parents’ consent.

The settlement requires Google to pay $136 million to the FTC
and an additional $34 million fine to New York state for allegedly
violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)
Rule.

The COPPA rule requires child-directed websites and online
services to explicitly obtain parental consent before collecting
personal information from children under the age of 13 and then
using it for targeted advertising.

However, an FTC investigation [PDF] against
Google’s video service for children, called YouTube Kids, revealed
that it had illegally gathered kids’ data under 13.
^[1]

The data also includes children’ persistent identification codes
used to track a user’s Internet browsing habits over time without
notifying their parents and getting their consent.

According to the regulators, YouTube earned millions of dollars
by using that collected information to deliver targeted
advertisements to viewers of these channels.

“YouTube touted its popularity with children to prospective
corporate clients,” FTC Chairman Joe Simons said ^[2]. “Yet when it came to
complying with COPPA, the company refused to acknowledge that
portions of its platform were directed to kids. There’s no excuse
for YouTube’s violations of the law.”

To settle the charges, YouTube agreed to pay a penalty of $170
million, with $136 million going to the FTC and $34 million to New
York State.

The penalty is by far the most significant amount the FTC has
ever obtained in a case involving the COPPA rule since Congress
enacted this law in 1998. However, it is just a fraction of the
$5 billion fine
the FTC imposed on Facebook this year for privacy
violations.
^[3]^[4]

Besides the monetary fine, the proposed settlement also requires
Google and YouTube to make changes to protect children’s privacy on
YouTube by:

Developing and maintaining a system that lets channel owners
identify ‘child-directed content’ on the video-sharing platform so
that YouTube can ensure it is complying with COPPA.
Notifying channel owners that their child-directed content may be
subject to the COPPA Rule’s obligations and provide annual training
about complying with the law for employees who deal with YouTube
channel owners.

In response to the fine, YouTube CEO Susan
Wojcicki ^[5] said that “nothing is
more important than protecting kids and their privacy,” adding that
“we will limit data collection and use on videos made for kids only
to what is needed to support the operation of the service.”

Additionally, Wojcicki said YouTube would also “stop serving
personalized ads on this content entirely, and some features will
no longer be available on this type of content, like comments and
notifications.

References

^{^}
PDF
(www.ftc.gov)
^{^}
said
(www.ftc.gov)
^{^}
$5 billion fine
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
privacy violations
(thehackernews.com)
^{^}
Susan Wojcicki
(youtube.googleblog.com)

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Google Fined $170 Million For Violating Kids’ Privacy On YouTube

References

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