Google, YouTube to Pay $170M Penalty over Collecting Kids' Personal Info
npr.org
npr.org
The trickier part is "all age" content. Even something like Minecraft, which at the surface is aimed at kids, I know many adults who watch and play the game... Are all Minecraft streamers screwed?
It's even worse. The account signed a EULA saying they are over 13, and this account most likely also happens to be shared between the parent and their kid, so the explicit video being watched aside, it's impossible to tell if the phone is currently in the hand of the parent or the kid, constantly going back and forth.
The solution they're going to implement is to treat anyone watching a "kid" video as a kid. Not only is this going to hit creators hard, but the "kid on their parents phone" could still watch non-kid videos and they would get tracked...
It's a really messy solution. It's like if we started suing porn sites for every minor on their website that lied about being 18.
There's always been problematic or otherwise weird children's content, and content that was mostly just an ad (80s cartoons were bad about that), but some of the stuff you can find on YouTube is in a whole new class of questionable. At least some of those 80s toy commercial cartoons were still entertaining in some way.
In 10 years people will be looking back at this in shock that it happened and there will be downstream affects on the kids exposed to it. It's literally programming weird stuff into the psyche of these young children.
~20 years ago people were deeply concerned about the impact and influence that sophisticated television and radio advertising campaigns were having on people, culture, and the economy.
It's gotten so bad now that we seem to have forgotten about how creeped out people were about the comparatively tame advertising through broadcast media. It's not safe to assume the world will march forward to be better or more moral as time goes on. We're just as likely to regress as progress, and the myth that progress is a passive endeavor makes it more likely that we won't.
Most children's television content has some value: a lesson, moral or at least an actual story.
Others have mentioned the horrifying inappropriate content, but even ignoring that, there is a mind-boggling amount of content on YouTube that is really devoid of value (at least in terms of what I want my kids watching):
* Nursery rhymes -- which is not so bad, but it just keeps going forever
* People (often adults) dressed up as children's story characters, just goofing around
* People (not always kids) literally just playing with toys
* People (not always kids) doing some mind-numbing repetitive task (for 10's of minutes) like opening kinder eggs, molding play doh or pouring glitter on things
For instance, I suspect a lot of kids do not have proper fear of wild animals, because from television they know animals are friendly, and some can even talk.
Additionally, bad guys wear black and have scars, while good guys are clean shaven and wear attractive clothing.
There was a whole “panic” at my kids school about not warning your kids not to watch “Momo” videos.
Unfortunately, these are now unbelievably vapid and pointless, even on PBS. It’s not quite clear what happened. The comparison to early Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, Newton’s Apple, Long Ago and Far Away, Reading Rainbow, Bill Nye the Science Guy, etc. is stark. I’m not convinced most of the current shows are any better than watching an endless stream of poorly produced nursery rhymes on youtube.
I wouldn’t let young children spend nontrivial amounts of time watching “Kids’ TV” in 2019.
Of all the Google products that get deprecated or killed, this is the one I wish they'd amputate.
Further, no matter what you kid starts watching, the recommendation algorithms always head you down the path to this content.
Start with sesame street or some known A+ content, 5 mins later its "learn colors with Mattel car" x 1000.
You really need to whitelist things, to avoid the "Billys toy review" and the 10,000 clones.
I think this ship sailed like eighty years ago... Seriously just about every successful kids show from my youth - with the possible partial exception of Sesame Street - were thinly disguised toy advertisements.
I grew up on Arthur, Mr Rogers, and Sesame Street. It’s certainly possible to have quality noncommercial children’s programming.
Sure, it's possible, but not in the quantities consumed by children.
I don't think that negates the garbage content and algos from youtube, and we avoid youtube with our kids, but if kids are running out of quality content, send them outside and lock the door.
What we're thinking is "I need an hour free from entertaining my child, this entertains them."
It's quite simple, it's the modern equivalent of "go outside and play" for a generation where kids going outside for hours of loosely supervised play is frowned upon by society.
It's funny that people are worried about letting kids play around their neighbors outside but letting any random person have access to them from YouTube is preferred? I can at least vet my neighbors.
I don't give a fuck what people think. There's no laws against it. I send my kids outside and tell them to come home for dinner. I live in a major metro in the US. They visit friends, neighbor dogs, bring home flowers from neighbor's gardens.
It's hard to believe that you can trust a kid on the internet if you can't trust them outside by themselves. And let's be honest, the chances are actually higher that you're a threat to your kid than some random person trolling the neighborhood.
Where did common sense and doing what's clearly best for your kid go?
edit: if you give your kid one hour per day to take a break, you need to come up with 7 hours of viable content a week. That should be pretty easy to do without going through youtube. There's stuff out there that is reasonable and we haven't even dipped into minecraft.
I feel bad for the kid.
Also, please don't dismiss someone else's perspective as "clutching pearls" -- that's not really fair.
All of those were products of PBS. So it seems like if we want it to be possible it needs to be primarily funded by donors, grants, and public spending.
Just because a show is built around a product doesn't mean it's a show devoid of value or quality entertainment.
Would be great to have an option to "ban" channels in YouTube (without additional apps), because some of "kids" content on YouTube looks pretty insane and I think can be harmful for kids.
Youtube Kids also now has whitelisting, so you can in theory just pick channels manually and avoid all the bad crap.
UPDATE: Looks like most fines are paid to the US Treasury. [1][2]
There seems to be some info on this page, but it appears to be only for sanctions violations (OFAC): https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/CivPen/Pa...
[1] https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2015/11/05/good-question-wher...
[2] https://www.sfgate.com/business/networth/article/When-govern...
What it actually means is that your effective net punishment/fine is $700, irrespective of the headline number. Which matters if the numbers are designed to be impactful.
Ostensibly the courts would factor in tax benefits to their calculations for punitive damages, under the current system. I don’t believe there are any limits on what punitive damages can account for, beyond “make it hurt”.
Not sure if this is a fine written into law though, which would not be able to easily account for tax differences.
Certainly, penalties that follow as a result of violations of law should not be tax deductible business expenses.
No.
Taxes are expenses, taxes are not tax deductible.
The most common fines and penalties (late fees on federal and state tax returns, are not tax deductible (nor are parking tickets or safety violations).
Insurance is an expense, some insurances premiums are and some are not tax deductible.
Capital Expenses and Equipment, depends, but usually not deductible as a expense but as depreciation over time.
Commuting Costs, generally non-allowable deductions.
Home Office, its tricky and full of bullshit. Same with personal expenses (car/phone)
Political Contributions, tricky and full of bullshit, generally not tax deductible.
Corporate gifts? your deduction is capped at $25.
The Tax Code doesn't have bright-line rules like "every cost" is tax deductible.
* Fines, as other people have stated, are usually not deductible. They aren't in Canada, for sure, and they are added back to income (i.e. you're taxed on that amount).
* There is usually a big difference between how leases are treated for accounting purposes and for tax purposes
* Accounting requires that things like accounts receivable to be measured at the expected value. Accounting generally requires an allowance to be booked as an expense for doubtful accounts, even if you don't know which accounts are doubtful. This is usually done on a basis like, historically 2% of accounts are doubtful, so we'll book that expense. For accounting, that's fine, but for tax purposes only actual bad debts are deductible.
* In Canada, capital gains are taxed at 50%, while for accounting purposes 100% of the gain is included in income.
* Capital asset purchases are not deductible, but are depreciated instead over time
* There's limits on things like meals and entertainment. In Canada, only 50% of them are deductible as it is assumed there is always a personal portion to a meal.
So it's not like everything is always deductible, there are many things that income is adjusted for for tax purposes.
>YouTube said that, in a about four months, it will begin treating data "from anyone watching children's content on YouTube as coming from a child, regardless of the age of the user" and will stop serving personalized ads on this content and end comments and notifications on it.
I wonder if spoofing your identity as a child will become a viable anti tracking strategy
not even a slap on the wrist.. more like a disappointed stare
It's an idea that's been around for a long time and one could argue it's growing in popularity as a concept. But it's not very popular in the legal world yet.
Your crimes are against the state in most cases, which is where the fines will go.
How many millions?
Because if it's $500m then I'm going to pissed off because Google's just going to consider the fine a cost of doing business and continue about their merry way.
But if they only made, like, $2m from this information, then the fine seems like a legitimate tool to stop this sort of shitty behavior.
Google has $170M in petty cash. This is not a fine. It's not even an inconvenience.
They already brainwashed us ,but, put bandaid for cancer?
How does it make it right ?
"This advertising method work great! What other markets can we apply it to?"
"There is this a market it works even better on, and keeps them coming back for decades."
"Decades? Great! Let's do it."
"Well, that market is kids. Are you sure we should?"
"Hmm... didn't think of that. Well, too late to stop now. Besides, the government set up rules that when you do it, you just pay a fine. It's like a toll road. We'll follow their rules and everything will be fine."
"It's decided then. Project Kids is on."
When some people in Google saw the temptation for such outcomes, they proposed publicly committing to avoid being evil. When push came to shove, they backed down on the public commitment.
With each situation, they can choose to return to their public commitment or what they're doing now.
They seem to pick this option many times and the public commitment keeps getting relegated to more minor places. Last I heard "Don't be evil" was buried in an HR document.
The shareholders are happy, though, right?
It's still there, I don't know why this myth keeps getting spread around. Yeah it's at the bottom instead of the top. But it's still there.
I wrote, ". . .relegated to more minor places. Last I heard 'Don't be evil' was buried in an HR document", which doesn't claim they've removed the phrase. It seems consistent with the link above, https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct, that shows the phrase at the bottom of pages and pages of bureaucrat-eze (mentioning HR several times), like the ark at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
You seem to imply that I "literally" spread a lie and falsely claimed a "straight up lie." Did I misread?
Narrator: "A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A x B x C = X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
Businesswoman on plane: "Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?"
Narrator: "You wouldn't believe."
Businesswoman on plane: "Which car company do you work for?"
Narrator: "A major one."
I guess the argument here was that the parents let their kids watch on their account, and since the video is clearly for kids, Youtube should've not collected data on it because obviously adults wouldn't be watching this video. Seems a bit of a stretch.
Youtube knows kids are watching videos. The only thing they don't know is, are the parents present. They could implement a captcha between videos the majority of kids would fail ("What is 25-11?" / "What is the engine of a train called?") but they chose not to do anything like that.
Now it's up to Google to 1. figure out which videos (uploaded by others) are for kids, and 2. automatically assume everyone watching said videos are kids. Both of those steps are rough approximations. The better solution is to stick to the EULA and have kids actually use Youtube Kids, instead of "guessing" what videos and users are.
I mean, I would consider a 13 year old to be a kid? And more to the point, you don't need to have an account to have ads targeted at you. YouTube can say "well kids shouldn't be there" but if they were interested in knowing if viewers were kids, I'm sure they could figure it out.
> I guess the argument here was that the parents let their kids watch on their account, and since the video is clearly for kids, Youtube should've not collected data on it because obviously adults wouldn't be watching this video. Seems a bit of a stretch.
You're missing the point of the comment you replied to. Laws that are enforced by fines are legal for the rich, full stop, because they just pay the fine. In the case of individuals, this is why the wealthy are fine with paying speeding tickets and the like: the money means nothing to them. So, you have a company like YouTube making millions and millions (if not billions) of dollars targeting ads at children, probably the most valuable ad demographic because they haven't been browbeaten with advertising messages enough yet and they still work very well on them. So YouTube does this stuff, and sets aside money for when they're caught. Then they pay the fine, and get a tax write-off in the process.
Fines don't do shit. Period. You wanna stop this kind of thing, change the laws so that the management in charge of these kinds of decisions and programs, or failing that, those that failed to see what was being done, are held personally accountable. I guarantee you'll see a hell of a lot less stupid risk-taking by companies when the penalty isn't a pittance of the profits attained.
It doesn't matter what you consider, the law under which they were sued is explicit about the age below which you are not allowed to collect data. This is the reason why almost every website out there asks you if you're older than 13 when you create an account.
> You're missing the point of the comment you replied to.
The comment I replied to opened with a whole mock narrative about engineers deciding to advertise on kids. My point is that this is a non-trivial and non-obvious issue. As far as Youtube is concerned, they made a site where 13yo+ can upload and watch videos. What ended up happening is that people uploaded videos for kids, and others let their kids watch said videos. It's disingenuous to make it sound like Youtube intentionally planned this.
I agree that fines don't do this. And again, the laws are pretty explicit, but this is a complex case, which is what I was trying to convey. It's not an obvious "someone in a dark room wrote code that collects children data".
That's a great idea.
Along that line, I've been wondering lately what are the ramifications for telling dipshit websites I'm European so they must delete my data if I'm not?
It's gotten better for Canadians as the average quality of sites has improved, but it was consistently designs from a prior era and 1/10th the content.
"This offering is not available in your country, because we're doing our absolute best to turn the Internet into Countrynet. Soz."
Adults and teens have secrets, kids relatively speaking for the most part don't, at least not ones worth protecting through strenuous tech laws. Okay okay, I get that we don't want them vulnerable to be manipulated into stealing their parents money. And Google is as always scrum. But the general laser focus on kids when we should be concentrating on everybody seems just like another think of the children hysteria.
Basically my response has been “hell no!”, since IME the only safe YouTube experience for kids is no YouTube experience at all.
Turns out kids get tracked on YouTube too. Who would have thought, eh?
So yeah. The answer is still no. Stop asking, Google.
A fine of anything less than a billion is like breeze hitting Google's face. You want to slap them, make that stock hurt.