YouTube Ads May Have Led to Online Tracking of Children, Research Says

See: Piracy, Speeding, Lesser: Fraud, Theft

Of course advertisers, not just on Youtube, but pretty much everywhere track children's interests as well as adults. Someone said recently, "the antichrist has already arrived, and he works, in a suit and tie, in advertising" which while hyperbolic is surprisingly fitting. Mass tracking (which is a form of surveillance) for the uses of taking advantage of weaknesses in a human being (impulse control, gotchas, perceived "need", etc.) to reap monetary rewards at the expense of the individual, whether adult or adolescent, whether intelligent, or mentally handicapped... which may result in a percieved or otherwise degredation of QoL. It is immoral, not just unethical.

Most "tracking" scripts aren't age gated, most advertisers don't care, every day I grow to hate them and their institutions more and more. I would say that at this point, not having adblockers, and blocking tracking scripts is a form of enabling these parasites. Which, i believe (with strong conviction) that there is an argument to say that enabling such behavior without contest is unethical at the very least bordering on immoral.

And in the USA at least tracking children under 13 is illegal.

They 100% know they are advertising to some children, even if just by mistakenly mislabeling children as older in rare cases. That's impossible to prevent through probabilistic means, so by implementing such systems they have accepted such an outcome.

That's the problem.

They know based on usage patterns. They know what age groups watch which videos. They use it to target children.

But because they didn't explicitly collect it, they can skirt the law.

The intent of the law is being ignored for profit.

Going to youtubekids.com, it makes parents (the age check is a 1st grade arithmetic question) agree to this, so they're clearly in violation of the law according to your Paul Lekas quote:

We also use this information to offer users personalized content. We associate an identifier that's unique to the app with the videos your child has watched and terms they've searched for to recommend content likely to be of interest to them, subject to the controls described below.

We use unique identifiers to provide contextual advertising, including ad frequency capping. The app does not allow interest-based advertising or remarketing.

YouTube Kids does not allow your child to share personal information with third parties or make it publicly available.

But then later, they make it clear that they also don't allow your child to avoid sharing personal information with third parties:

For external processing

We may provide individual user information to our affiliates or other trusted businesses or persons to process it for us, based on our instructions and in compliance with our Privacy Policy and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures.

They then incorporate additional ToS documents by reference. It's already clear they're violating COPPA according to SIIA, so I'm not going to bother continue reading:

You can find additional information about the app in the YouTube Kids Privacy Notice and the Parental Guide. Our Disclosure for Children explains our data processing practices to your child, which we encourage you to review with them.

Dated: August 7, 2019

Wait until they see they are still being tracked, only the opted_out column in their profile data shows "true" instead of false.