YouTube Accused of Violating Pact Against Tracking Kids for Ads

Google LLC’s YouTube continues to collect behavioral data on children in violation of federal child privacy law despite a settlement agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, a group of digital advocacy organizations said Wednesday.

The group led by Fairplay filed a request for investigation with the FTC to examine whether YouTube engages in personal data collection of users watching “made for kids videos” that allow targeted ads.

The request comes a week after a new report from the advertising research firm Adalytics found that YouTube appeared to be tracking children across the internet based on ad campaigns on the platform.

The FTC had previously pursued a complaint—also from a coalition led by Fairplay—against YouTube for violations of the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act in 2019, resulting in a $170 million settlement that year that required the video-sharing platform to allow channel owners to identify child-oriented content.

Google spokesperson Michael Aciman said the Adalytics’ report is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how advertising works for made for kids videos. The company continues “to abide by the agreements we made with the FTC and COPPA requirements as they relate to content that is made for kids,” he said in a statement.

“We do not allow ads personalization on made for kids content and we do not allow advertisers to target children with ads across any of our products,” Aciman said. “We also do not offer advertisers the option to directly target made for kids content as a whole.”

Aciman noted that while some content creators may designate their channels as “made for kids,” their videos can include a combination of content that is meant for children and content that’s not.

Fairplay and Adalytics claimed on Wednesday that they ran their own test ad purchases on YouTube and were permited to behaviorally target channels marked as “made for kids.”

Fairplay said its $10 test ad campaign targeted a series of attributes such as “retiring soon” and “cloud service power users,” making close to 1,500 impressions across 46 “made for kids” channels.

YouTube “should not posses and should not be able to provide an ad buyer with this type of behavioral data about viewers of these videos,” Fairplay’s request said.

“If YouTube and Google were actually treating the viewers of ‘made for kids’ videos and channels as children, the companies would not know which viewers are ‘motorcycle enthusiasts’ or ‘cloud services power users.”

COPPA requires parental consent for websites to collect data on users younger than 13 for ad targeting. Adalytics’ report claimed that when viewers of “made for kids” videos click on an ad, data about the viewer is tracked and sent to the advertisers website.

COPPA penalties can include fines of more than $50,000 per violation. In a press release, Fairplay Executive Director Josh Golin said that could expose Google to billions in penalties.

“The FTC should seek the maximum fine for every single violation of COPPA and injunctive relief befitting a repeat offender,” he said.