YouTube may face billions in fines if FTC confirms child privacy violations | Hacker News Reader

YouTube may face billions in fines if FTC confirms child privacy violations

arstechnica.com

64 pointsBender18 comments

>makes completely false claims and draws uninformed conclusions based solely on the presence of cookies, which are widely used in these contexts for the purposes of fraud detection and frequency capping—both of which are permitted under COPPA

Anyone who's an expert at COPPA know if this is true? The weirdest thing IMO would be if the FTC specifically insisted that kids need to be able to ballot-stuff view counts and run DDoS attacks against Google.

Of all the things social media platforms are violating children's privacy with, fraud detection and frequency capping -- effectively ensuring the same person doesn't see the same ad repetitively -- is among the least of the concerns.

If this is indeed solely the reason the FTC believes children's privacy is violated, it's a really poor choice.

And of all the predations on the net - it’s wild THIS is what the ftc goes after. How about non age gated / warned gore and porn? How is that no a violation?

In this age, I don’t know why browsers don’t simply have parental controls built in. Nearly all adult sites declare themselves to be adults only in their meta data, and if they don’t they can easily be shortlisted as such.

Heck even blocking the top 100 would pretty much ensure children can’t access the content freely.

I remember there being a voluntary rating system for websites back in the 90s. No clue if anyone actually used it, but there was a setting to enable it back in IE6.

If you are in Apple world, there are built in parental controls. "Allowed Web Content"

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201304

The FTC is going after what is made available to them, and the privacy watchdogs said "hey YouTube Kids still has cookies and behavioral ads on it" so they're going to look into that.

My understanding was that age gating was a purely voluntary practice and that the 1st Amendment bars government enforcement of age gating on media. Almost two decades ago California tried to enforce age gating on video games and got shot down by SCOTUS[0]. I am aware that several deep-red states (e.g. Utah) are trying the same thing for porn. I doubt such a thing will get by SCOTUS, not even today's right-leaning court that's in a 'overturn precedent the liberals like' mood. So if the FTC were to start going after YouTube for Pregnant Elsa Spiderman videos they're likely to have a huge legal battle on their hands.

Let's be perfectly clear: if social media companies are required to ensure a 100% success rate with your kids not seeing garbage on YouTube, then they're going to start requiring age verification for any use of their service. Age verification companies are very scummy and, even if they weren't, requiring you to deal with such a company in order to watch a YouTube video is unnecessarily invasive. Practically speaking, if you want everyone to be able to upload video, then the best you can do for keeping kids out of the gore and porn videos is a series of 'good enough' educated guesses. YouTube is not a babysitter.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchan...

You may have missed the first two-thirds of the article.

The FTC has not announced anything; there are four trade groups who have performed investigations and have sent reports of potential COPPA violations to the FTC.

The allegations are specifically that YouTube is serving targeted ads to children in violation of their consent decree with the FTC (for previous COPPA violations).

The statement from Fairplay that YouTube says is a misunderstanding of cookies follows:

> YouTube and Google have agreed to ensure that, every time a video is uploaded to YouTube by a content creator, the content creator will have to designate the video as child-directed or not. For videos designated as child-directed, YouTube will not serve behavioral advertisements or track persistent identifiers. ... If YouTube does then serve behavioral advertisements using persistent identifiers or otherwise engage in tracking for such content, it will have violated both COPPA and the order.

I’m no “but won’t someone think of the children” and try to evaluate each case individually, and frequently disagree that something should be done for children’s’ sake. However YouTube, TikTok, etc have severely violated privacy and I think should be pounded with the hammer of the law through fines.

I dunno, the case better be airtight.

The FTC can't afford to chase another technical red herring.

Here is the report from Adalytics which was confirmed by Fairplay

https://adalytics.io/blog/are-youtube-ads-coppa-compliant

Pretty damning if Google is farming personalized ad clicks from children and hiding granular placement information from ad buyers. There would appear to be a large financial incentive to do so.

fucking great, now maybe we can hold them accountable for leaking our PII to creepy advertisers that follow you around with a slew of creepy adds.

They absolutely should. They won't, but they should.

A lot of the modern megacorps basically made their money by ignoring laws that were put in place to prevent farming the younger generation, and yet here we are.

YouTube has child influencers with targeted product placement. E.g. Ryan Toy Review

Where is opportunity, there is money maker

Should it?

It really should be trillions at this point. Fines are just a cost of doing business for these companies.

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