News

FTC May Investigate YouTube Over Child Privacy Violations

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has recently been sent a request from four nonprofit groups in regards to YouTube violating children’s privacy with their targeted ads.

YouTube Privacy Violations

As reported by arstechnica.com, four nonprofit groups have sent a letter to the US FTC to request that YouTube is investigated over its data and advertising practices primarily in regard to children. The letter from ‘Fairplay’ alleges that YouTube may still be harvesting the data of children in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The groups behind the letter ran ad campaigns to check if YouTube were blocking personalized ads in videos that were aimed at children and discovered that it was not the case and the targeted ads were still appearing on these videos, 1446 times to be specific.

This accusation is fairly serious as YouTube has already been hit previously with a penalty for violating COPPA and if found to violate it again there could be a much larger penalty, possibly in the billions. The New York Times received a statement from a Google spokesperson, Michael Aciman, who claimed “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,”.

For now, the accusing party will have to wait for the FTC to conduct their own investigation before anything can happen here and that could take some time.

Jakob Aylesbury

Disqus Comments Loading...

Recent Posts

Electronic Arts Titles Played for Over 11 Billion Hours in 2024

Electronic Arts (EA) announced today that its games were played for over 11 billion hours…

2 days ago

Just 15% of Steam Gaming Time in 2024 Was Spent on New Releases

Steam's annual end-of-year recap, Steam Replay, provides fascinating insights into gamer habits by comparing individual…

2 days ago

STALKER 2 Gets Massive 110GB Patch With 1800+ Fixes

GSC GameWorld released a major title update for STALKER 2 this seeking, bringing the game…

2 days ago

Intel Unveils Core 200H Processors Based on the Previous Raptor Lake Refresh

Without any formal announcement, Intel appears to have revealed its new Core 200H series processors…

3 days ago

Ubisoft Reportedly Developing a New Quadruple A Game

Ubisoft is not having the best of times, but despite recent flops, the company still…

3 days ago

STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl Update 1.1 Fixes 1,800 Issues and Revamps A-Life 2.0

If you haven’t started playing STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl yet, now might be the…

3 days ago