{"id":16307,"date":"2019-09-12T13:10:02","date_gmt":"2019-09-12T21:10:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2019\/09\/12\/news-10049\/"},"modified":"2019-09-12T13:10:02","modified_gmt":"2019-09-12T21:10:02","slug":"news-10049","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2019\/09\/12\/news-10049\/","title":{"rendered":"YouTube ordered to cough up $170M settlement over COPPA infraction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Credit to Author: Jovi Umawing| Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2019 20:15:22 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

Last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that it has required Google and YouTube to pay a settlement fee totaling $170 million after its video-sharing platform was found violating the Children\u2019s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)<\/a>. The complaint was filed by the FTC and the New York Attorney General, with the former set to receive the penalty amounting to $136 million and the latter $34 million.<\/p>\n

According to the FTC’s press release<\/a>, this penalty “is by far the largest amount the FTC has ever obtained in a COPPA case since Congress enacted the law in 1998.”<\/p>\n

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Comparison of privacy cases won against Google (Courtesy: The FTC) <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Note that the complaint doesn\u2019t involve the YouTube Kids app, a YouTube service dedicated to showcasing child-directed content only. Although the app still displays ads<\/a>, albeit to a limited degree, it doesn\u2019t track child data for this purpose.<\/p>\n

This win over Google and YouTube follows on the heels of several complaints filed by the FTC in 2019 aiming to protect children’s privacy online. In May, three dating apps were removed from both the Apple and Google market places<\/a> after the FTC alleged that the apps allowed 12-year-old kids to access them.<\/p>\n

i-Dressup.com, a dress-up game website, agreed to settle charges<\/a> in April after the FTC filed a complaint, alleging that the operators of the website failed to ask for parental consent when collecting data from children under 13.<\/p>\n

In a similar case in February, the FTC reached a settlement with Musical.ly<\/a>, now popularly known as TikTok, after its operators were found to collect data of young children, which includes their full names, email addresses, and other personally identifiable information (PII)<\/a> without their parents\u2019 consent.<\/p>\n

A summary of YouTube\u2019s violation<\/h3>\n

Since its inception, YouTube has touted itself as a video-sharing platform for general audience content. It was created for adults and not intended for children under 13 years of age.<\/p>\n

Through the years, however, YouTube has become a constant companion of young children. In fact, according to market research company, Smarty Pants, YouTube is recognized as the<\/em> most beloved brand among US kids aged 6\u201312 years old for four straight years since 2016. [1<\/a>][2<\/a>][3<\/a>][4<\/a>]<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also exceedingly difficult to defend the argument that “YouTube is not for children” when a sizable amount of child-directed content is already present\u2014and continues to grow and rake in billions of views\u2014on the platform.<\/p>\n

YouTube’s business model is dependent on collecting personal information and persistent identifiers (i.e., cookies<\/a>) from users for behavioral or personalized advertising. Child-directed channel owners who chose to monetize their content allowed YouTube to collect data of their target audience: children under 13, the age group YouTube said it wasn’t built for.<\/p>\n

It’s easy to assume that YouTube may not have the means to know which data belongs to which age group, else they would have acted on it. However, according to the complaint<\/a> [PDF], YouTube did know that they were collecting data from children.<\/p>\n

More surprising, even, is the fact that Google used YouTube\u2019s brand popularity among young kids as part of their marketing tactic, selling themselves to manufacturers and brands of child-centric products and services as \u201cthe new Saturday Morning Cartoons\u201d among others.<\/p>\n

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How Google sells YouTube to third-parties offering goods and services to children. (Courtesy: The FTC)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Despite this knowledge, YouTube never attempted to notify parents about their data collection process, nor did they ask parents for consent in the data collection. In COPPA\u2019s eyes, these are enormous red flags.<\/p>\n

Good news: positive change is at hand<\/h3>\n

The settlement agreed upon between the FTC and Google\/YouTube includes a monetary relief\u2014the $170 million payout in this case\u2014and three injunctive reliefs, which is defined as an act or prohibition the companies must complete as ordered by the court. As per the press release, the injunctions are as follows:<\/p>\n