Google and YouTube have agreed to pay $170 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and New York Attorney General over the tech firms’ alleged violations of the privacy of children.
The FTC and New York Attorney General have accused YouTube and its parent company Google of acting in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) that forbids online services from collecting data on children younger than 13 without explicit consent of their parents. According to the official complaint [PDF], the firms “knew that the YouTube platform had numerous child-directed channels,” and knowingly collected the data of users visiting such channels without ever attempting “to provide parents with the COPPA-specified notice of their information practices or [to] obtain verifiable parental consent.”
Read more: Google and YouTube part with $170 million to settle alleged violations of kid’s privacy
