On September 4, 2019, Google agreed to pay 170 million dollars as a fine for illegally gathering children’s personal information online. The way Google did this was by using identification codes to track children’s web browsing history.

Google illegally gathered kid’s personal information, then target them with personalized advertisements. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), sued Google for breaking the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Basically, the COPPA law states that companies cannot gather information online from kids that are under 13 years old.

Making amends

To settle things down, Google agreed to the FTC to pay a record 170 million fine. It is so far the largest fine the FTC has collected from a COPPA case, breaking the previous record of $5.7 million paid by Tik Tok in February 2018.

Google also agreed to make changes on YouTube to make it a healthier and safer community for kids, so they will also ask content creators if their content is family-friendly or not.

Other changes

They will also make other changes like asking for parent’s consent before gathering their child’s information. They plan on making other changes like stopping personalized ads from running on family-friendly content and to totally stop gathering the personal information of children online. YouTube also plans to strongly promote YouTube Kids, an app specially designed for kids to watch videos.

Problems for YouTubers

YouTube content creators have been complaining about the changes that YouTube will eventually make. They complained that if they make these changes to family-friendly content, ads will stop running on their videos and they won’t make as much money as before. Lots of YouTubers are terrified by the changes YouTube is making.

Prior issues

Google has been dealing with a fine in the past recent years. In 2012, Google paid 22.5 million for tracking data from Safari. In March 2019, Google was fined 1.7 billion for abusing the online advertising market.

The FTC and Google are trying to make YouTube and a healthy and safe place for kids to find entertainment. Therefore, they have to make a change.