Google has to pay the FTC a multimillion dollar fine to settle a probe into YouTube’s shortcomings when it comes to protecting kids using its service, according to The Washington Post.
The Washington Post says the commission found that Google and YouTube failed to protect children adequately and that they collected their data, which breached the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act or COPPA.
The FTC has been getting child privacy complaints against YouTube for years, according to previous reports. COPPA, after all, prohibits companies from collecting data from users under 13 and from targeting them with personalized ads. To better protect kids using the internet these days, the agency intends to reexamine how COPPA is enforced, seeing as a lot of young users access websites and video games that weren’t made for them.
Given that tracking and data collection are fundamentals of how platforms such as YouTube operate, it’s tricky to say how Google should change their practices for under 13s. With videos for very young children, often such content is visited through parents’ accounts with an adult present, so tracking may be perfectly legal. Plus children under 13 aren’t meant to be allowed to have their own accounts, so account-tracking should be fine. But the reality is somewhat different, as kids between about 7 and 13 are likely to be viewing content regardless of any of YouTube’s own policies.
A multimillion dollar fine is likely chump change for a massive corporation like Google, and the FTC’s officials were reportedly divided on the settlement: it was reportedly backed by the agency’s three Republicans and opposed by its two Democrats. That said, the agency’s decision could affect the tech industry as a whole. As the Post noted, the issues privacy advocates raised against Google also apply to other tech and gaming companies.
