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The suspicious thing is YouTube tries to detect children's content, not users who are children… so this means YouTube is doing ad targeting on what it believes
by TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
The suspicious thing is YouTube tries to detect children's content, not users who are children… so this means YouTube is doing ad targeting on what it believes to be children so long as they're not watching “children's content”? Or such is the impression I got from this excellent essay about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuScIN4emyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuScIN4emyo
- pkaye 7y agoHow would YouTube know the user is a child?
- throwaway2048 7y agoWhere do you think Google Analytics demographic data comes from.
- pkaye 7y agoI don't know. Enlighten me. And how accurate is the identification?
- hannasanarion 7y agoAccurate enough that they sell it to advertisers who want children to see their ads. If their demographic detection was bad, they would have no revenue and no customers since that's the flagship product that they are selling.
- lern_too_spel 7y agoThe lowest age range YouTube Ads lets you target is 18-24.
- hannasanarion 7y agoThere are plenty of age proxies that youtube happily lets advertisers target. Advertisers can tell youtube "Show my ad to fans of Peppa Pig".
- unapologetic 7y agoOh they don't. They absolutely completely have no way at all of knowing. Just ask them, no way of being sure. Course the data is all there, but they just really promise they never put it together and knowingly went after kids.
- ronilan 7y agoAssume, just for the sake of the discussion, obviously, that it may be possible, using some certain commonly accepted methods, and with some reasonable, commonly accepted margin of error, to detect that a user, signed into an account, is NOT a child. Will this help?
- pkaye 7y agoIts better to filter out content that is targeting kids.
- derefr 7y agoWhat is a "user"? Is it the owner of the account? Or is it the person using the account at the moment? When I'm signed into the YouTube app on my smart TV, and anyone who sits in front of the TV can use the app to play content, then who is the "user" of the app? Can you detect that my child is currently the one sitting there flipping through videos?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- danShumway 7y agoDepends on whether you're willing to tolerate false positives. To start with, I'm not a huge fan of the idea that the Internet as whole could be legally obligated to assume I'm a child unless I provide every site I visit with a drivers license, for example. But let's take your assumption to the next level: let's assume that there's some privacy-respecting way of doing this (I don't believe there is, but we'll temporarily pretend it exists). I'm also not a huge fan of the idea that the Internet as a whole could be legally obligated to assume I'm a child based on criteria that are outside of my control. I personally think most of our experience with filters online have taught us that they're best implemented close to the consumer, not close to the source. To be clear, both Youtube and the FTC are turning this into a dumpster fire. But the idea of filtering content that's designed for children is better than the idea of filtering consumers. It's just that this implementation of that idea is garbage and unnecessarily hurts creators.
- ogre_codes 7y agoEither they have a children's account (https://support.google.com/families/answer/7103338?hl=en https://support.google.com/families/answer/7103338?hl=en) Or Google figures it out the same way they infer any number of things about you and use it to resell advertising. If they can figure out someone is a woman between 19 and 25, I'm pretty sure they can figure out with a good degree of accuracy that a user is under 15.
- ouid 7y agoIn a similar vein, if it's illegal to do enough tracking on a 12 year old to identify them as a 12 year old, and 12 year olds exist, then it's illegal to do any tracking, right?
- derefr 7y agoYou could just turn the negative-detection into positive detection: sell hardware that you have to be 18 to buy, and then provide your service only through that hardware.
- pkaye 7y agoParents will buy said hardware for their kids.
- derefr 7y agoWell, that's fine, then; with enough clear labelling, that's legally entirely the parents' fault.
- tssva 7y agoGoogle already requires accounts with a birth date indicating they are 13 or older, thus not subject to COPA, to verify their age via charging a credit card or sending in a copy of a government issued id. Any kids that were watching either stole a credit card or their parents created the account for them. The FTC decided this was not adequate, so I don't expect they would deem your scheme compliant either.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Traster 7y agoWell COPPA (the bill that caused this) is targeting companies that are creating content targeted at children, not targeting the children themselves. And it is the content the bill is interested in. The observable (and controversial) effect of this is an outcry by content creators, I suspect the measures they take around accounts identified as children are much less obvious and entirely orthogonal.
- iamaelephant 7y agoI suspect Google doesn't want to tip their hand and show just how unreliable their demographic data is. There's a perception among the public that these companies siphoning up so much data must be able to know everything about individual users, and in fact Google's largest revenue stream relies on this perception. If I'm right, then when the house of cards falls on this Big Data Bubble it will be painful for a lot of tech companies, Facebook and Google especially.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y agoFair, Google may not trust their inferences to the point of them becoming a legal liability.
- iamaelephant 7y agoDo you believe that relying on their creators to be honest about the content is a better bet?
- robbrown451 7y agoI would imagine Google's legal team would answer that with a resounding "yes."
- iamaelephant 7y agoI'm not talking about Google's legal team. We already know which way their going due to the article. I'm talking about reality.
- robbrown451 7y agoOk but the post you replied to was speculating on Google's motivations, and therefore talking about legal liability. I guess if you are speaking of "what is best for society", ok, but that's a completely different thing. It sure seemed like you were debating the post above, but I guess not.
- mobjack 7y agoMy daughter uses my YouTube account to watch children's videos. She has zero interest watching anything targeted towards adults. Content is likely the strongest indicator determining if someone is a child or not.
- danShumway 7y agoThe problem is there is no good way to tell if a user is a child without violating their privacy. You can't ask their age, they'll lie. Targeting content aimed at children is... I'm not going to pretend it's good, or even long-term viable (malicious videos are still going to slip through). But it passes the extremely low bar of being better than age-verification gates.
- dwild 7y ago> The suspicious thing is YouTube tries to detect children's content, not users who are children… Theses whole changes are happening because they were tracking childrens (well they were tracking everyone, which included childrens). They can't store any data from a child, none at all. That means that they can't detect if it's a child, and even if they had a magical way to do it, storing the "isChildren" variable set as true would be illegal in itself. COPPA decided that a video targeting child was a proof that they knew child were watching, and thus tracking them. So instead they move the responsibility to the content creator to say whether the content is for kids or not (thus not storing data on the child, while still being able to not track the user which is now assumed to be a child). The only way they can store data about a child require parent permission.