Google agreed to pay between $150 and $200 million to the Justice Department to settle the FTC investigation.
It started when several advocacy groups submitted a complaint to the United States government agency, asking it to investigate whether the site had violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
YouTube was said to collect data about its young users to serve them targeted ads without the consent of their parents. And COPPA is intended to ensure no one can exploit children online without their parents knowledge of what’s going on.
The text of the rule, specifies that YouTube must provide "a reasonable means for a parent to review the personal information collected from a child and to refuse to permit its further use or maintenance" as well as secure the information.
And the millions are meant to resolve this FTC investigation over this YouTube's alleged violations of children’s privacy law.
When the investigation was going on, YouTube was making moves to stop advertising targeting children.
The streaming giant was in the process of moving YouTube Kids to its own site, and adding more age categories to the Kids app. By partitioning child-friendly videos off the main site, YouTube wants to avoid accidentally targeting ads.
With YouTube in settling its case with the FTC, some people don't see this as a solution.
Jeff Chester, executive director for the Center for Digital Democracy, told Politico, “The punishment should’ve been at least half a billion dollars. It’s scandalous. It sends the signal that you in fact can break a privacy law and get away largely scot-free.”
Several groups behind the original COPPA complaint against YouTube also viewed the settlement skeptically.
"They should levy a fine which both levels the playing field, and serves as a deterrent to future COPPA violations. This fine would do neither," Josh Golin, executive director of coalition leader the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, said in a statement, noting that a fine in the $150 million to $200 million range is "the equivalent of two to three months of YouTube ad revenue."
But according to Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts, who wrote COPPA, the money isn’t the incentive so much as ensuring companies don’t get the jump on gathering data on children before they’re old enough to consent.
This settlement is only one of the several moves by the FTC to crack down tech companies' violations.
Facebook has previously paid at least $5 billion to resolve an expansive agency probe into its data practices. And for COPPA violations, the largest fine imposed by the FTC was $5.7 million, levied in February 2019 against the operators of Musical.ly..
And as for this YouTube case, the lawmakers also want the FTC to mandate annual independent audits for YouTube to monitor compliance with the terms of the settlement and to block it from launching new children's services without outside review.
"I look forward to reviewing the requirements placed upon Google in this settlement, but I am disappointed that the Commission appears poised to once again come out with a partisan settlement that that falls short of the Commission’s responsibility to consumers and risks normalizing corporate bad behavior," the lawmaker said.