Advocacy groups on Wednesday requested the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) probe YouTube over its handling of children’s data based on recent media reporting on ads placed on content for kids.
Fairplay, The Center for Digital Democracy, Common Sense and Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) sent a letter Wednesday asking the regulatory agency to launch an investigation based on findings that the advocacy groups said indicates YouTube parent company Google is violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the company’s own rules.
The request and reporting from Fairplay builds on a separate report released last week by Adalytics that also questioned Google's handling of children's data. It urged two senators to ask the FTC to look into Google’s compliance with COPPA and its 2019 settlement with the FTC over potential COPPA violations.
At the time, Google pushed back strongly on the Adalytics report, calling it “deeply flawed and misleading.”
The company also told The New York Times that ads on children’s videos are based on webpage content and not targeted to user profiles.
That prompted Fairplay to conduct a follow-up report to look into ad targeting.
Fairplay and ad buyers ran test ad campaigns on YouTube where they selected a series of user attributes and affinities for ad targeting and instructed Google to run those ads on “made for kids” channels. The test campaign was also targeted to 21 audience segments unlikely to be children, such as “recently retired” or “moving soon,” so it would be unlikely that those ads would be placed contextually on the channels.
Since YouTube’s policy states it does not run personalized ads on “made for kids” content, treating any viewer of the content as a child, Fairplay said the ad campaign should have resulted in “zero placements.”
However, the test resulted in all 1,446 test ads running on the identified “made for kids” channels, according to the report.
Additionally, the Audience Segment Report from Google sent back to the ad buyers and Fairplay indicated that each impression was targeted at one of the 21 audience segments to which the campaign was targeted.
“If Google’s representations to its advertisers are accurate, it is violating COPPA,” Fairplay executive director Josh Golin said in a statement.
“The FTC must launch an immediate and comprehensive investigation and use its subpoena authority to better understand Google’s black box child-directed ad targeting. If Google and YouTube are violating COPPA and flouting their settlement agreement with the Commission, the FTC should seek the maximum fine for every single violation of COPPA and injunctive relief befitting a repeat offender,” Golin added.
The request to the FTC from the advocacy groups follows one made by Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) last week after the release of the Adalytics report.
A Google spokesperson said in a statement that the conclusions in the report “point to a fundamental misunderstanding of how advertising works on made for kids content.”
“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. We also do not offer advertisers the option to directly target made for kids content as a whole,” the spokesperson said.
“Given the allegations, we wish the author of the report had contacted us first. We've reached out to them to clarify what they saw and share how our protections work,” they added.
In an earlier response to the Adalytics report, Google was critical that the report focused primarily on cookies, or small portions of text sent to a browser based on what website a user visits, and indicated that cookies set by YouTube allowed for ad targeting and tracking on browsers for viewers of YouTube videos labeled as for kids.
A YouTube spokesperson said last week the report “makes completely false claims and draws uninformed conclusions based solely on the presence of cookies, which are widely used in these contexts for the purposes of fraud detection and frequency capping — both of which are permitted under COPPA.”
As pressure is building for the FTC to probe YouTube, bipartisan support is also mounting for updates to children’s online safety rules. For example, Markey’s COPPA 2.0 proposal, which would update the law to ban targeted advertising to children among other measures, advanced out of the Senate Commerce Committee with bipartisan support in July.
The proposal advanced out of the committee last session as well but failed to get a floor vote by the end of the year.