YouTube has been fined more than $150 million for allegedly violating children's privacy laws. That is the agreement reached between Google's video platform and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which has been investigating whether it violated a law that makes it illegal to collect information from children under 13 and disclose it to others without parental permission.
The deal comes a week after Google launched a web version of its child-focused YouTube Kids service, in another attempt to ensure that children and their parents find the platform a safe place for fun and entertainment.
to ensure that parents and armenia phone number children find a safe place for leisure. However, it seems that users are still not convinced , especially when the company itself has confirmed that it will not be able to ensure the excellent detection of all inappropriate, violent or misleading videos.
According to Bloomberg , the settlement represents the largest U.S. enforcement action against a major technology company in the past five years for practices involving minors.
YouTube is not the only app in the spotlight. The millennial app par excellence, TikTok, was ordered to pay $5.7 million in February for violating privacy and illegally collecting data from minors, such as email addresses and others, without parental consent.
Both YouTube and TikTok, among other companies, have been investigated for violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998. Democratic Senator Ed Markey, a key figure in the approval of this law, has expressed through a statement the importance of "taking down companies" that infringe on children's privacy and violate federal law : "We owe it to the children," he said.
Despite all the criticism, YouTube has maintained for months that children under 13 cannot enjoy YouTube without parental supervision, which is not what it seems. The video platform continues to incorporate parental controls into its YouTube Kids application and to put obstacles to advertisements based on browsing cookies. All efforts are insufficient to preserve the security and privacy of the youngest.