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Google, YouTube to Pay $170M Penalty over Collecting Kids' Personal Info
- dagnysdildo 7y ago170M is Google's "hookers and blow" budget, not a meaningful penalty. We need to think bigger. Either destroy the corporation outright, or ban it from certain markets for at least five years.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dang 7y agoThis account has been breaking the HN guidelines by posting unsubstantive comments. Also, the username is borderline trollish, which isn't allowed here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20trollish%20username https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... I've banned this account, but if you don't want it to be banned you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com.
- timboslice 7y agoGoogle doesn't care. https://brave.com/google-gdpr-workaround/ https://brave.com/google-gdpr-workaround/
- colpabar 7y agoI don't see how anyone could come to any other conclusion. It feels like every day we find out about yet another tech company finding a new way to extract more of our personal data. At this point, the only appropriate response in my opinion is to ask: are we mad enough to do anything about this yet?
- kache_ 7y agoJust a slap on the wrist in the grand scheme of things, considering how large the children's ad market is >YouTube said that, in a about four months, it will begin treating data "from anyone watching children's content on YouTube as coming from a child, regardless of the age of the user" and will stop serving personalized ads on this content and end comments and notifications on it. I wonder if spoofing your identity as a child will become a viable anti tracking strategy
- keiru 7y ago"I am 12 and what is this" needed a comeback
- delecti 7y agoIf you want to exclusively watch children's content then sure, you could call that a "viable" strategy to avoid tracking.
- kalleboo 7y agoOh boy I'm looking forward to hearing about random YouTubers' content getting flagged as children's content and losing a further chunk of their revenue...
- sleepybrett 7y ago> Just a slap on the wrist in the grand scheme of things, considering how large the children's ad market is not even a slap on the wrist.. more like a disappointed stare
- newguy1234 7y agoIt would work but also you'll face more restrictions or outright blocks. For example, you register an account and put you are 5 years old. After clicking register you get redirected to disney.com or something.
- Pxtl 7y agoIt seems like Youtube Kids is an abomination on every level. Between Elsagate, privacy violations, and the generally pathetic unboxing-oriented nature of its mainstay content, it's a revolting offering for children. Of all the Google products that get deprecated or killed, this is the one I wish they'd amputate.
- dna_polymerase 7y agoThis whole Elsagate stuff is only the tip of the iceberg. People like Jake Paul produce horrific 'content' targeted at young audiences. I can recommend this video on the topic (not 100% about YT Kids, but it is in there): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywcY8TvES6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywcY8TvES6c
- CriticalCathed 7y agoDeep eyeroll. Horrific is a grand overstatement. Children need protection from predatory advertising, but suggestive, stupid, or violent content isn't going to hurt kids (pre-teen ages.) Kids don't really need sheltering; and, it doesn't really work anyway. What they need is guidance and context, which only an involved parent can provide. To be clear I don't mean that they need their parents to digest content then regurgitate it to them.
- SkyBelow 7y agoSome of it is needlessly gross but of no significant concern. Some of it is truly horrifying. Take the ASMR cop incident, and the whole family enabling their child to keep producing such content.
- icebraining 7y agoWhat's the ASMR cop incident?
- i_am_nomad 7y ago
- porpoisemonkey 7y agoI spent a few minutes of DuckDuckGo'ing but couldn't find anything... does anyone know if there's a way to see how/if these fines are actually being paid? UPDATE: Looks like most fines are paid to the US Treasury. [1][2] There seems to be some info on this page, but it appears to be only for sanctions violations (OFAC): https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/CivPen/Pages/civpen-index2.aspx https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/CivPen/Pa... [1] https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2015/11/05/good-question-where-does-money-from-government-fines-go/ https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2015/11/05/good-question-wher... [2] https://www.sfgate.com/business/networth/article/When-government-fines-companies-who-gets-cash-3189724.php https://www.sfgate.com/business/networth/article/When-govern...
- satya71 7y agoThe fine is also tax-deductible.
- mey 7y agoDo larger companies optimize when they pay fines to adjust their tax burden?
- krustyburger 7y agoWhich is especially irksome because Alphabet pays such a low rate already.
- Naga 7y agoTaxes are assessed at a percentage of income. If a fine is deductible, you have lower income, and your taxes are lower, yes. But you paid the government for that right! If your tax rate is 30% and you pay a $1000 fine, you save $300 in taxes. But you paid $1000 for that right!
- Ntrails 7y ago> If your tax rate is 30% and you pay a $1000 fine, you save $300 in taxes. But you paid $1000 for that right! What it actually means is that your effective net punishment/fine is $700, irrespective of the headline number. Which matters if the numbers are designed to be impactful.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- luxuryballs 7y agoWhere does this money even go? If not to the victims then it’s just a fine, which is just another way of saying a cost of doing business.
- dmix 7y agoWhat you're talking about is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice It's an idea that's been around for a long time and one could argue it's growing in popularity as a concept. But it's not very popular in the legal world yet. Your crimes are against the state in most cases, which is where the fines will go.
- flycaliguy 7y agoThis is going to reflect back very poorly when they face their shareholders next quarter.
- colpabar 7y agoWhy?
- benologist 7y ago> I wonder if spoofing your identity as a child will become a viable anti tracking strategy That's a great idea. Along that line, I've been wondering lately what are the ramifications for telling dipshit websites I'm European so they must delete my data if I'm not?
- bvda 7y agoI've used a similar trick to pretend I was 18+ on certain websites in the past, have never had any issues with it.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoI think every teenager on the Internet routinely does that.
- dmix 7y agoAnd every Canadian learns to press the I'm from the US button on every website (see: car sites) if they want to see the better website and aren't actually shopping. It's gotten better for Canadians as the average quality of sites has improved, but it was consistently designs from a prior era and 1/10th the content.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jkeuhlen 7y agoAs someone from the US, I've never heard about this before. Could you explain what that is? Why is there a "I'm from the US button" on sites?
- bradstewart 7y agoA lot of eCommerce websites will only ship to/operate in the U.S. for a variety of reasons (business registration requirements, consumer protection laws, currency exchange, international shipping, etc. Hence websites like newegg.com and newegg.ca.
- chasing 7y ago> YouTube earned millions of dollars by then using this information to target ads to the children, according to the complaint. How many millions? Because if it's $500m then I'm going to pissed off because Google's just going to consider the fine a cost of doing business and continue about their merry way. But if they only made, like, $2m from this information, then the fine seems like a legitimate tool to stop this sort of shitty behavior.
- williesleg 7y agoJust a shakedown
- 3131s 7y agoThe real problem is much worse than just data collection. The children's content on Youtube is the most vacuous garbage in existence and young children have wasted billions of hours watching it on autoplay.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoThis differs in no way, except for the name "YouTube", from the objection to children watching television that goes back several decades.
- OrgNet 7y agoPBS-Kids is on average much better then YouTube-Kids
- sli 7y agoChildren's television didn't include a nearly endless flood of horrifying and sometimes trauma-inducing autogenerated content that (illegally) leverages pop culture and otherwise kid-friendly characters, all just to push as many ads as possible into kids' faces. There's always been problematic or otherwise weird children's content, and content that was mostly just an ad (80s cartoons were bad about that), but some of the stuff you can find on YouTube is in a whole new class of questionable. At least some of those 80s toy commercial cartoons were still entertaining in some way.
- solotronics 7y agoExactly, it's unconstrained algo generated content that just seeks out the weirdest stuff that will capture a childs attention. It has been discussed on here before and it is super creepy. In 10 years people will be looking back at this in shock that it happened and there will be downstream affects on the kids exposed to it. It's literally programming weird stuff into the psyche of these young children.
- naravara 7y ago
- nkkollaw 7y agoShouldn't the fine be larger than how much they make, to deter them from doing the same thing in the future?
- nojvek 7y ago170M fine for a company that makes ~10B of earnings and 30B of revenue per quarter. That's like someone making 100k per year and only having to pay 50 cents in fine. Even parking fines are a much more steeper in % for average joe. A fine of anything less than a billion is like breeze hitting Google's face. You want to slap them, make that stock hurt.
- josteink 7y agoThat’s funny. The last few weeks google has been trying to push me into downloading/using YouTube kids for a “safe” experience. Basically my response has been “hell no!”, since IME the only safe YouTube experience for kids is no YouTube experience at all. Turns out kids get tracked on YouTube too. Who would have thought, eh? So yeah. The answer is still no. Stop asking, Google.
- cybersnowflake 7y agoSeems a bit backward to me. Why should we care so much more about kid's privacy than adult privacy? Are you really more concerned that people know about your Barney the Magical Dinosaur addiction at 8 than your sordid affair at 32? Would you much rather keep secret that you walked back and forth from kindergarten everyday than your employers confidential design files? Adults and teens have secrets, kids relatively speaking for the most part don't, at least not ones worth protecting through strenuous tech laws. Okay okay, I get that we don't want them vulnerable to be manipulated into stealing their parents money. And Google is as always scrum. But the general laser focus on kids when we should be concentrating on everybody seems just like another think of the children hysteria.
- spodek 7y agoTheir meetings must be like Phillip Morris or whatever it's called now: "This advertising method work great! What other markets can we apply it to?" "There is this a market it works even better on, and keeps them coming back for decades." "Decades? Great! Let's do it." "Well, that market is kids. Are you sure we should?" "Hmm... didn't think of that. Well, too late to stop now. Besides, the government set up rules that when you do it, you just pay a fine. It's like a toll road. We'll follow their rules and everything will be fine." "It's decided then. Project Kids is on." When some people in Google saw the temptation for such outcomes, they proposed publicly committing to avoid being evil. When push came to shove, they backed down on the public commitment. With each situation, they can choose to return to their public commitment or what they're doing now. They seem to pick this option many times and the public commitment keeps getting relegated to more minor places. Last I heard "Don't be evil" was buried in an HR document. The shareholders are happy, though, right?
- snowe2010 7y agohttps://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/ https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/ It's still there, I don't know why this myth keeps getting spread around. Yeah it's at the bottom instead of the top. But it's still there.
- bgdam 7y agoBecause actions speak louder than words, and Google's actions have, of late, been far from 'Do no evil'.
- Trias11 7y agoJust a regular tipping of government out of some pocket change to keep doing things.
- imdsm 7y agoPays it to whom?
- patientplatypus 7y agoSo if experience has taught me anything, this just means that they made more than $170M on this. Cost of doing business.
- malicioususer11 7y agoCerial Comercials on Barney Cartoons?? Somebody Call The Chairman Of The FCC!!!
- dang 7y agoDiscussed a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20844346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20844346
- c3534l 7y agoTo be clear, Google isn't accused of intentionally tracking children in defiance of privacy laws, they're accused of not erring hard enough on the side of "this is a child" when guessing the age of a user they don't know the age of. This sounds like a genuine grey area that YouTube was on the wrong side of. Doesn't mean they were right, but everyone's acting like this is flagrant disregard of the law when in fact it is an edge case that didn't yet have a clear standard.
- newguy1234 7y agoGoogle/youtube still won't be able to do anything because kids are smart. They'll just make accounts saying they're 22 years old. It reminds me of the times when I was like 14 and started watching pornography. To say the least, you quickly learn to just click the "yes, I am 18+ years old". That's the reality. If YT/google were to really enforce it they would make all YT/google accounts require ID submission for commenting/uploading etc.
- ggggtez 7y agoWhich is a real shame. All people lose a little freedom and anonymity to "protect the children".
- 43920 7y agoGoogle already has a minimum age of 13 to create an account (the maximum age before COPPA no longer applies). The issue here is that if a child didn't sign in or used an account where they claimed to be older, they would still have their information collected - the FTC is arguing that Google should have disabled tracking on all videos targeted towards children, even when they didn't know the age of the person watching.
- ehsankia 7y agoSo basically all kid content creators are going to be hit hard once this goes into effect, and we'll get another wave of backlash about "Youtube is killing our channel" The trickier part is "all age" content. Even something like Minecraft, which at the surface is aimed at kids, I know many adults who watch and play the game... Are all Minecraft streamers screwed?
- beaconfield 7y agogrumpy cat face good
- JohnClark1337 7y ago$170M? That's probably how much falls out of Sundar Pichai's car whenever he opens the door.
- reaperducer 7y agoI wonder what percentage of $170M is what Google spends on employee coffee each year. 90%? 95%? Google has $170M in petty cash. This is not a fine. It's not even an inconvenience.
- xvector 7y agoThe ability to indoctrinate the children of the future is worth magnitudes more than this measly penalty.
- unsined 7y ago$350M worth of data
- imvetri 7y agoMan, whats the point of paying penalty after causing damage? They already brainwashed us ,but, put bandaid for cancer? How does it make it right ?