Someone Think of the Children

the Internet and how companies collect and use private information. Essentially, the point of that episode was to show how in the era of big data, practically everything we do generates at least a data point that goes into a constantly more detailed depiction of who we are, digitally speaking, and

that numerous companies are profiting off that information. And sometimes it means we as individuals actually see some sort of benefit from that, right like targeted personalized experien ins can be a benefit, but sometimes it really just means we're

being exploited in some way. Now, you could say that for adults, this is just the price you pay to be a modern citizen of our digital world, particularly when it involves joining various online platforms and services that include statements that explain that the service is going to collect, share, and leverage data from users. And you could argue, hey, you agreed to do this when you signed up for

an account, even if you didn't bother reading the fine print. However, it is a different matter entirely when it comes to kids. Kids don't have the awareness of what it means to share information about themselves. They don't understand the potential consequences. So it wouldn't be ethical to convince a kid to sign any sort of binding agreement without that kid's parent or guardian present and consenting to it. And so when it comes to the privacy of kids, things take a

pretty serious turn. In the United States. That includes the passing of a law in nine called the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act or KAPPA CEO p p A. Today, I want to explore what prompted the drafting and passage of KAPPA, and some cases in which companies have been found guilty of failing to comply with the rules of KAPPA, and how that has affected content on the Internet in general. Generally speaking, when it comes to technology and the law,

there is a lot of opportunity for messiness. Technology advances at a far faster pace than what we see in the legal world. Heck, the folks who draft legislation tend to be let's say a bit on the older side, which can also mean that they can sometimes be a little bit out of touch when it comes to modern technology. And we see this all the time with politicians just struggling to understand the scope and the effect of technology while simultaneously trying to draft legislation that in some way

intersects with technology. It doesn't always go well, and often this means there's a figurative disconnect between the law and the tech, and that can lead to unintended consequences. At the same time, we can see the clear need for legislation, at least in some cases. The fact that there aren't hard and fast legal protections for online privacy in general has led us to this condition in the United States

in which our data becomes digital currency. Only it's currency that we the generators, the people that are making that data. We don't get to profit off of that, at least not you know, directly. Other people and companies are making billions of dollars off the data that we create, which doesn't seem terribly fair, does it That we're not compensated for generating all this information. Our compensation tends to be

the use of a service or platform. Anyway, My point is we can have situations in which we need legislation, and yet we can also have those situations where the laws we get may not measure up to what we actually need. So let's take a look at Kappa and

figure out if it does what it's supposed to do. Now, of course, this means we also have to look at some history, and a predecessor to Kappa is an industry organization called the Children's Advertising Revenue Unit or caru CE a are you, that formed in nineteen seventy four out

of the Better Business Bureau here in the United States. Now, traditionally, marketing targeted adults, right, there was adults that heard all the different ads, But by the nineteen seventies, television programs that were aimed specifically at kids were really becoming a

regular thing. And if the audience for those shows were kids, well, that meant that the ads that were being displayed during those shows were also being directed towards kids, and that meant marketers had to craft ads that would appeal to kids potentially so that those kids would go and then convince their parents to buy whatever stuff they were seeing on television, whether it was a toy or a serial or whatever. But again, this brings up some pretty tough

ethical questions. How do you market to kids who aren't old enough to make decisions for themselves? Rather than risk having the government step in and get involved. The television and advertising industries saw the wisdom in a self regulating body, and CARU created some basic core principles which would also become important for Kappa. The guidelines that CARU essentially set they say stuff like kids may not be aware that they're even being advertised too, and they might have limited

experience with the persuasive nature of advertising. So therefore, advertisers need to show a special responsibility when they are marketing towards kids. And as someone who grew up in the seventies and eighties, I can tell you that it could get pretty tricky to separate the ads from the content back in those days, partly because a lot of the shows geared towards kids were really nothing more than, you know,

grandiose commercials for lines of toys and stuff. I'm looking at you, Transformers and g I Joe and he Man. The guideline stress the advertisers need to be substantive in

their claims when it comes to ads directed at kids. So, in other words, ads should not give kids the idea that they'd be able to do stuff with a product that just isn't possible, you know, like buying a he Man plastic sword, and that if you just say, by the power of Gray Skull, I have the power, you will somehow magically get a page boy haircut and giant muscles. I can tell you from personal experience that's just not

the case. Other guidelines say that advertisers should not advertise products or services that are not appropriate for kids two kids, So you shouldn't be getting like ads for car dealerships in the middle of your Saturday morning cartoon block or something like that, and that adds should include a diverse representation within them. They shouldn't all be the same ethnicity.

And that also adds should reinforce positive social interactions, like being honest in such In other words, the idea was, yeah, we're gonna allow for advertising to kids, but let's do it in a way where at least it seems like it's wholesome. Now, I think it's fair to say that these guidelines, which would again go on to inform the rules for Kappa, weren't the product of necessarily a sincere concern for children so much as it was an effort

to head the government off at the past. And I say this as someone who has studied advertising and marketing a little bit, and I walked away with a distinct impression that ethics are you know, that's mostly something that happens to other industries compared to marketing and advertising. Sometimes ethics were seen as something of a drawback in that field, particularly if you study the advertising of the fifties and

sixties the stuff. You should know. Guys have done episodes on advertising from that era, and those episodes are phenomenal and they really detail how sleazy that world could be. And while that kind of foolishness might be aimed at adults without much of a blink of an eye, the

story is different when there are kids involved. That being said, Cairo takes the issue of advertising to kids in a responsible way as a serious thing, because, again, if the organization fails in this regard, if the industry starts to fall short, the government is going to step in. There will be a a strong position from the citizens for the government to step in and do something about it. And like many industries, the advertising world is not super

keen on the idea of regulation. But let's move forward.

So while you might look back on the children's programming and advertising from the eighties and into the nineties and say, huh, it seems like those guidelines were pretty lucy goosey, and that a lot of a lot of programming may not have followed it all that closely, the fact was that Cairo was in charge of making sure things didn't go too far astray in the United States, and then in the early nineties, the mainstream public became aware of this

thing called the Internet. Now, those of you who have listened to this show for a long time, or those of you who have studied the Internet, know that the Internet and its predecessors like our ponnet have actually been around for a really long time. But outside of a RelA tive ly small population of researchers and students and government officials, hardly anyone knew anything about it. And that changed with the launch and evolution of the Worldwide Web.

The Web was a much more user friendly and intuitive way to access the Internet. The adoption of the Web by the mainstream didn't happen overnight, but without the Web, I think it's pretty safe to say that the general awareness about the Internet in general h and what you could do with it would have lagged behind by several

years at the least. Anyway, once websites started to really be a thing, and once companies began to kind of cautiously dip their corporate toe in the web and see how they might conduct commerce and further, how they might advertise to people online, CARU really began to get a

bit proactive in the online space. There was a legitimate concern that one of the things that makes the web great, that being that it's easy to access stuff if you just have a browser, uh, internet connection and some basic web skills, that also makes the web a potential pitfall

when it comes to how children access and process information. Moreover, as I mentioned in Monday's episode, it didn't take very long at all for companies to use the Internet in order to start gathering information about users in order to advertise to them more effectively, And it wasn't long at all before companies began to build out databases of user information.

And while you might make the argument that a mature adult, or you know, at least someone who's of an adult age has the wherewithal to sign over their right to privacy with an understanding of what that actually means. The saint can't be said of kids, and thus CARU focused on how various sites and services would gather and use information online when it came to the information of children. In nine CARU published a new set of guidelines called

Interactive Electronic Media. This was in an effort to get ahead of issues that were starting to pop up thanks to the web. The goal was to create new guidelines for the online space that would protect the privacy of those under the age of thirteen, which was kind of

an arbitrary age picked it. It reflected the ages that CARU was focused on as part of advertising in general, and it was easy to see the need for this approach because even as early as nineteen there were companies that were advertising to kids online and they weren't necessarily following the CARU guidelines that had been in place for like television advertising. Plus, there was the issue of companies

collecting information about these young consumers without parental consent. The canary in the coal mine for this issue turned out to be a website called kids Calm, which, as the

name implies, was a child focused site. Kids Calm used tools like register straation forms, pen Pal programs, and contest entries to gather information about their users, that is, kids who are visiting the site, and hey, this is a good time to remind you that if you happen to be entering a sweepstakes or contest online or even offline, what you're really doing is you're handing over your information to some third party, and you can bet that information

is going to be used in some way. It may be used directly by the entity you hand it to. So it may be that, for example, it's a magazine publisher and you filled out this information. Well, now the magazine publisher is going to market other magazines directly to you. Or it might mean that your information gets put into a database that other companies can pay to access, or

it could be a combination of the two. Anyway, kids Calm was doing this, but the big problem was that a lot of kids Calm users were you know kids. The FTC investigated Kids Come after receiving a complaint letter about the site from the Center of Media Education. The FTC found kids Come in violation of several FTC rules with regard to the collection and sharing of data, and it had turned out that kids Come was in fact

sharing a database of user information with third parties. On the bright side, the data was an aggregate, so it was not formatted to reveal personal information unique to individuals. It was more inaggregate. It was all collected so that there was no personally identifiable people in there. It could have been worse, is what I'm saying. Kids Come agreed to change its ways and to conform to the rules,

and that site stuck around till two thousand nineteen. But the case of kids Come laid bare the potential dangers of data collection when it comes to young kids. This matter was seen as a serious one and it led to the Federal Trade Commission or FTC, to draft the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act KAPPA, and again that was passed into law. In that law used CARUS Interactive Electronic

Media Guidelines as a foundation. The law applies to websites and service operators that either directly target children for the purposes to collect, use, or disclose personal information of those children, or that have actual knowledge that those sites and services are in the process of doing whatever it is they

are doing, also collecting, using, or disclosing children's personal information. So, in other words, whether a company is setting out explicitly to collect information about specific kids or that just happens to be a byproduct of whatever the company is doing, these laws have to apply to those types of entities. But as we'll see, this approach is not quite as black and white as it sounds. We're gonna take a

quick break and we'll be right back. Okay, So I want to clarify something I said before the break, which

is how the law applies to sites and services online. Now, Essentially, an Internet based entity would need to follow COPPA if that entities service was targeting those under thirteen and also collecting personal information about those users, or allows a third party to collect information about those users, like an advertiser, or if the entity runs some sort of ad network or uses plug ins that also collect information, such as like the Honey extension, that one collects personal information, and

if Honey knows for a fact that among the users of its service there are children under the age of thirteen, it has to comply with KAPPA. So, in other words, if you know for a fact that the information you are collecting includes information from kids, KAPPA applies. Third if your site or service aims for a general audience, but you happen to know that within that general audience there are people under the age of thirteen, and you are

gathering information on your audience. Kappa applies and see as kind of at the heart of what would cause issues for content creators on YouTube. There are channels that clearly target younger audiences, and there are some that, based on the nature of their content, clearly aren't meant for younger audiences.

But there are tons of channels where it hits this kind of gray area in which it might seem at a casual glance to be aimed at a younger viewer group, but in fact the channel contains content that is not appropriate for kids. And this gets into a bunch of tangential matters that open up so many kinds of worms that I'm just gonna touch on it here. We're not going to dive into it. That would be an entirely

separate episode. So what I mean by all this is that there are some forms of media that traditionally people associate with chill rans media. So I'm thinking about stuff like puppets or animation or video games, and yeah, I'm sure most of y'all listening to this can think of plenty of examples of those forms of entertainment that are definitely and definitively not for kids, like the Broadway show

Avenue Q that features puppets, but that show ain't for kids. Uh. There are lots of different animated series like anime that are far too sophisticated and contain content that would not be appropriate for children, might disturb them and upset them, and it's just not meant for younger viewers. And of course, we also know that the idea that video games are for kids is really an outdated concept. I mean, nearly forty of the video game playing population is between the

age of eighteen and thirty four. Another significant percentage is over the age of sixty five, So when you look at it, kids make up a minority of the people who are playing video games, and yet we still have this association that video games are for kids. But the fact that these types of entertainment have this traditional association with children's media is an ongoing issue that I'm sure

we're gonna loop back into before the end of this podcast. Anyway, Kappa passes in and while I've talked about who is subject to KAPPA. I haven't really covered the actual rules yet, so we're gonna go over those. And these rules come straight from the f TCS website on Kappa. Those entities that are subject to Kappa must and I quote, post a clear and comprehensive online privacy policy describing their information practices.

For personal information collected online from children, they must provide direct notice to parents and obtain verifiable parental consent with limited exceptions, before collecting personal information online from children. They must give parents the choice of consenting to the operator's collection and internal use of a child's information, but prohibiting the operator from disclosing that information to third parties, unless disclosure is integral to the site or service, in which

case this must be made clear to parents. They must provide parents access to their child's personal information to review and or have the information deleted. They must give parents the opportunity to prevent further use or online collection of a child's personal information. They must maintain the confidentiality, security, and integrity of information they collect from children, including by taking reasonable steps to release such information only to parties

capable of maintaining its confidentiality and security. They must retain personal information collected online from a child for only as long as is necessary to fulfill the purpose for which it was collected, and delete the information using reasonable measures to protect against its unauthorized access or use. And they must uh not condition a child's participation in an online activity on the child providing more information than is reasonably

necessary to participate in that activity. So what that last one means, by the way end quote, what that last one means is that you can't require kids to fill out like a lengthy online form with stuff like their full name and home address and phone number and email just so that they can play a game, because it's not necessary to have that information in order for the kid to play a game. That's what that last one means.

The FTC also goes on to define what constitutes personal information, so specifically, the FTC when they say personal information, they mean the first and last name of a person, their home or address including street name and town or city, their online contact information, their screen name or handle that can serve as online contact information on certain services and platforms.

A telephone number counts as personal information, social security numb or a persistent identifier that indicates a specific user across different user sessions and different sites and services. So this is something that would be unique to each person, but not something that they would have necessarily provided to the service. The service provides this to the person. So let's say I'm the third person to ever sign up for Facebook,

and Facebook assigns me user number zero zero zero zero, etcetera, etcetera. Three, that's my personal identifier. It's unique to me. It means Facebook can track me and my my activities. That's the kind of thing they're talking about there. That counts as personal information, even though it's something that the site assigns to the person, not something that the person gives to the site. It also includes any file that has the child's image or voice in it, so any sort of

video file or image file or audio file. It also includes geolocation data that can target where the child is, including like a street uh. It includes information collected by the service from the child or child's parents that complements

the other types of information mentioned. So that's like the registration forms and stuff I was talking about, and some of these types of personal identification subsets, such as that geolocation data, those were not part of Kappa originally back in n and ninety six, geolocation wasn't much of a thing because we were still waiting for GPS to be kind of opened up to the general public. It was still very much a military centered thing, and we were just in the very early days of having that change.

But in the FTC expanded KAPPA a bit, given that, you know, tech like smartphones had really created a new way to collect data and new types of data that could be useful to collect. So that's when we started to see some of those other things add it in, like geolocation and the personal identifier number. In twenty seventeen, the FTC would expand KAPPA again to apply it to not only to Web browsers and services on computers and smartphones, but also to other types of Internet connected devices like

IoT type stuff. And that was because with the proliferation of IoT sensors and toys and games, the FTC wanted to make certain that the rules would apply to these

new technologies and protect children. I did an episode I think it was on Forward Thinking actually the Forward Thinking podcast from several years ago, where we talked about the Internet connected Barbie doll and how that ended up posing as a potential security and privacy threat for children, and that's the sort of thing that the FTC really wanted

to get, you know, a handle on. Now, assuming that an entity that must comply with Kappa is following the rules, then that entity should be legally in the clear right if they as long as they're following the rules then and they're making sure they're getting parental consent first, they can still collect data, they can still use that data. They have to delete it after they use it, but

they're allowed to do it. But if there's an entity that is supposed to comply with Kappa and fails to follow the rules with regard to personal information, what happens then? All the first thing that someone has to do is file a complaint with the FTC or a state authority and explain the nature of this complaint with regard to

the handling of children's information. The FTC would then investigate this claim or a state authority would, and they would see if the accused online site or service was in fact in violation of Kappa. And if the authority determines that there has been a violation occurred, they can then bring a civil lawsuit against that site or service. The rules of Kappa state that the civil case can seek a penalty of forty three thousand seven dollars per violation.

That's the maximum amount per violation, but the FTC might not seek the maximum amount depending upon circumstances. So determining factors include the number of children affected. If it was a few children as opposed to a lot, then that

changes things how egregious the violation was. If it's something where it's found that a company was collecting user names, for example, but no other personal identifiable information, they might not get hit as hard um the types of personal information involved, how the information was used will determine it. And like I said, COPPA allows for state agencies to enforce compliance with KAPPA with respect to entities that are within those states jurisdiction, So there can be state level

COPPA cases as well as the federal level ones. And then we get to the concept of safe harbor within KAPPA. So safe harbor is a general concept in which a person or company faces limited legal liability so long as that person or company is following certain conditions. And I know that's super general, but the concept applies to a lot of different situations, so it has to be general.

So for example, a user generated content platform typically enjoys a certain amount of safe Harbor protection because those platforms are not responsible for the content that's published by their users. Right If I join a content platform as a user and I upload stuff that is against their policies, that's on me, not on the platform. However, as I mentioned, safe harbor typically only applies as long as certain conditions

continue to be met. So for a user generated content platform, one of those conditions could be that the platform has to take down an instance of user generated content if it's proven that that instance includes copyrighted material that doesn't

belong to the user. So if I start uploading you know, they might be giants tracks, and the platform i'm uploading them to get a notice, Hey, this guy is doing this without our permission, then that platform would be expected to you know, ban me or delete my material or whatever, and then it would continue to enjoy the protections of safe harbor because it actually took steps to address the issue.

If platforms don't follow whatever those rules are, and it's a case by case kind of thing, then they no longer enjoy the safe harbor protection. Well, with Kappa, it's possible for industry groups to file for safe Harbor status under the FTC, and these groups have to establish a set of rules and policies that are at least the same or greater than those defined by KAPPA. And if they do that, then they can apply for safe Harbor

status under KAPPA. And then regulation and enforcement kind of falls to that industry groups and the organizations that belong to industry group. So if a company then becomes a member of a particular industry group, and if industry group has safe Harbor status, the burden of responsibility really falls to that industry group to make sure that all the different member organizations are in compliance with that group's policies.

And I actually have a real world example. I can cite of a company that at one point belonged to a Safe Harbor group and it later got in trouble with the FTC. That company was the game developer Mini Clip, which in two thousand nine joined the children's advertising review Units Safe Harbor. So, yeah, CARU, it does have a Safe Harbor industry group under KAPPA. But in two thousand fifteen, CARU terminated Many Clips status as a member of that group.

I'm not actually sure why that happened. I don't know what led to many Clips status terminating under that Safe Harbor group, but the FTC pursued a complaint against many Clip because, according to the FTC, Many Clip continued to display a message on its websites saying that the company was part of Caru's Safe Harbor group well into two thousand nineteen, which was years after the company had its membership terminated, and the FTC's main complaint was that Mini

Clip was misrepresenting itself. It was presenting a falsehood that it was still a member of this Kappa compliant group, when in fact that was no longer the case. So this showed that Kappa applies not just to the direct activities that companies engage in that involved the collection and use of personal data that belongs to kids, but also how those companies represent themselves or in this case, misrepresent themselves. However, plenty of companies have been found guilty of violating Copper

rules with regard to children's data. For example, back in two thousand eight, Sony b MG, the music label, was sued by the FTC for collecting information on an estimated thirty thousand users below the age of thirteen through its websites.

See Sony b MG had sites that included some social networking aspects to them, and that required users to include stuff like their names and addresses and email address and that kind of thing, you know, the standard stuff that you have to fill in when you create an account on a social networking site. Now, Sony claimed on these sites that they were not meant for people under the age of thirteen. It was for thirteen or older, but there were no actual measures in place to actually prevent

kids from signing up. There was no sort of age gate process there, and the FTC alleged that not only was Sony not preventing it, the company was aware that thousands of users were under the age of thirteen. In the end, Sony BMG agreed to pay a one million dollar settlement to the FTC, and by in the end, I mean the day after the FTC filed the lawsuit

Sony agreed to settle. Sony also agreed to delete all personal information related to users under the age of thirteen, along with some other measures that were mandated by the terms of the settlement. Sony's big issue was that, while it proclaimed that the sites were intended for those thirteen

and older. It really had no measures in place to actually enforce that, and kids under that age could register and even include their actual age in the process, and that meant Sony was knowingly collecting data belonging to people under the age of thirteen. That's a big deal. Like, if you unknowingly collect the data of people under the age of thirteen, you actually have a bit of a defense if you can prove that you did so unknowingly. But when you knowingly collect it, it's a different kettle

of fish. When we come back, we'll talk about a few other cases in which companies have tried to sidestep the issues of Kappa entirely, and also how Kappa really freaked out a huge population of YouTube creators back in But first let's take another quick break. So when it comes to companies trying to avoid dealing with Kappa, we

got to talk about Facebook. Pretty much. Since the time Facebook opened up beyond college students, it has maintained that the services for people thirteen or older, and to make a Facebook profile, you have to include your name and an email address at a birth date, even if you don't intend on showing anyone else your birthdate, Facebook uses that information to in part to check your age. So if you're younger than thirteen, Facebook won't let you make

a profile. Why because then Facebook would be subjected to the rules of Kappa, and as a platform that hosts user generated content, that would be really hard for Facebook to comply with. And moreover, it would mean that Facebook would have to implement some serious restrictions on how it gathers information. As I've pointed out many times, because the vast majority of Facebook's massive revenue comes from how the platform harvests and uses our personal information. So Facebook has

the age gate approach. If a user fakes their birthday to get in, well, that's not really Facebook's fault, is it. That's just someone being dishonest, and Facebook isn't knowingly collecting

the data of a child. The company would still be collecting that data, mind you, but as long as there was no indication that the profile actually belonged to a child, the company would have the defense that, according to the information submitted to Facebook, that user was over the age of thirteen and so by positioning itself as a company that has a social networking site intended for thirteen and older, Facebook isn't subject to Kappa The system isn't perfect by

any stretch of the imagination, but it's hard to argue that Facebook is just using smoke and mirrors to seem as if it's complying. It might be easy to circumvent the rules, but there are rules. At various points. Since Kappa became law, lawmakers have considered expanding the rules and

upping the age to eighteen years old. Some lawmakers have asked why thirteen has been this arbitrary age, which kind of dates back to the old CARU guidelines, and so far the government has not increased the age limit on Kappa, which is a good thing for platforms like Facebook because a change like that would have a massive effect on that social network, as well as on countless other sites. And then we come to YouTube. Yikes, alright, so YouTube has had more than a rough recent history when it

comes to content and kids. First of all, YouTube has a policy that's pretty much the same as facebooks. You are not supposed to create a YouTube profile unless you're at least thirteen years old, and like Facebook, Google age gates this. Of course, someone might lie about when their birthday was, or a parent might set up an account and fudge a birthday so that their kid can watch stuff on YouTube. It's also entirely possible to just go to YouTube without being on a profile at all and

just watch content on YouTube as an anonymous user. So while YouTube age gates profiles, the platform doesn't actually age gate the general content on YouTube itself, at least not to that extent. And what's more, YouTube slash Google. When I use YouTube as a company name, you can probably substitute Google or even Alphabet in there, because it's all

one big, dysfunctional family. Anyway, YouTube knows all about this, which I mean no surprise that company is in the business of collecting and understanding our data better than we do. So in meetings with like big companies like Hasbro and Mattel, you know, big toy companies, YouTube has bragged about how it is a platform that is incredibly popular with children, like kids between the ages of two and twelve and stuff like that, so they're well aware that young kids

are watching YouTube. And then there's YouTube Kids, which is the actual app that's supposed to filter content by age group so that you can select using the app which videos should be shown to your kid, as in, like which videos that are appropriate to certain ages are allowed to be shown to your kid. Uh. The ages I think are five, eight, and thirteen, and it just depends on which one you set when you set up the account.

Like the standard version of YouTube, YouTube Kids generates revenue through ads, and Google got into trouble with this with the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood and the Center for Digital Democracy. They both argued that the way that ads were being presented to children on YouTube Kids made it seem like the ads were part of the content itself, which was considered to be misleading and in violation of Kappa.

So Google subsequently made those ads stand out a little bit more from the content itself in order to make a more clear divider between what was an ad and what was content. And my guess is you've heard the stories about weird and disturbing videos popping up both on YouTube and ultimately on YouTube Kids that was specifically targeting children.

These videos usually involve recognizable characters, ones that clearly have not been licensed, but characters like Elsa from Frozen or Spider Man from Marvel, and they're engaging in all sorts of weird and sometimes upsetting activities. Sometimes it's live action people dressed in costumes. Sometimes it's crude animation. Often the videos are completely wordless and just set to music, which

means there's no language barrier there. So they can have a pretty wide appeal globally, and they frequently involve activities that kids find fascinating. You know, stuff that happens in the world that kids think is really unusual or strange, like pregnancy or toilet's or you know, all sorts of things of that nature. Getting a shot from the doctor. That's a big one too. It's definitely not high cinema, but it's the kind of stuff that kids really fixate

on to different degrees and for different reasons. So through a combination of using meta keywords and other means, these videos would perform really well in in YouTube algorithms and often make the transition to YouTube kids, even if arguably the content was not appropriate, and then kids would stumble across them, and that in turn would upset parents who found out that their kids were watching these things, and

that ultimately made the news. Now, this issue had been going on for years, really, but it really came to light in twenty seventeen. That's when it it made headlines in the United States and it brought a pretty harsh spotlight on YouTube as a result, so the company began banning thousands of these garbage content channels, but now found

itself under some serious scrutiny. And that scrutiny included people who were concerned that videos that seemed like they might be aimed at kids were in fact not kid friendly, and that because YouTube's revenue model depends heavily on advertising, it's also meant that kids might be seeing ads that weren't really appropriate or didn't comply with CARU guidelines, and also that YouTube might be collecting information about kids without

parental consent. In September twenty nineteen, the FTC and the New York Attorney General reached a settlement with YouTube regarding an allegation that the company had been collecting personal information in the form of persistent identifiers used to track specific users as they navigate through the site and beyond, and that that included children under the age of thirteen and moreover, that YouTube did not first notify parents about this and

get the parents consent, which thus was a violation of Kappa. That settlement meant that YouTube would have to pay one hundred seventy million dollars in fines, which was the largest amount for a Kappa case at that point. The FDC chairman said, quote, YouTube touted its popularity with children to perspective corporate clients, yet when it came to complying with Kappa, the company refused to acknowledge that portions of its platform were clearly directed to kids. There's no excuse for YouTube's

violations of the law. End quote. The complaints stated that YouTube positions itself as a general audience site, but in fact has many channels clearly geared toward younger audiences. For example, videos of people unboxing toys that are meant for little

kids seems to fall pretty neatly into that category. And so YouTube, as a platform that knowingly played host to child directed channels, had a responsibility to make certain those channels and then, more importantly, the advertising on those channels complied with Copper rules. Well, there's nothing like a big old fine to incentivize a company to changing its policies, and that's what YouTube did. Creators now have to indicate

whether their channels are child directed or not. They can also label specific videos on a case by case basis as to whether or not that video is directed toward children. Any video determined to be child directed, either because the user made that indication or YouTube figured it out or decided that was the case. Anyone that did that would not be allowed to include certain ways of collecting personal

information from viewers. Now, most creators don't actually collect information from their viewers at all, and at least not to this level. Most of the creators who are YouTube partners and who are running ads on their videos are relying on YouTube's algorithms to serve up advertising. They don't usually actually have a say in what kind of ads are

going to play against their videos. And because of YouTube's dynamic ad program, two different people in two different parts of the world who watched the exact same video with the same number of ad breaks could see very different ads. But for videos that can't collect personal information, and that

selection of ads gets whittled down quite a lot. So that meant that creators who had child directed channels would find it more difficult to monetize their work and they would see a lower return on investment, and for some creators that could be severe enough to make it unprofitable and thus unsupportable to continue making videos on YouTube. Creators complained to YouTube, saying that it was difficult to determine whether or not content was really child directed or not.

Maybe it was just family friendly but not specifically child directed. So, for example, videos of Let's Plays, in which content creators play video games and often provide commentary and so on, they kind of fall into that gray area because there is still that perception that video games are for kids, even though most of the population playing games these days are older than thirteen, and most games contain content that's

not really kid friendly. I'm pretty sure no one would claim like Grand Theft Auto is appropriate content for small kids, or that the Resident Evil franchise is great for a six year old. But because there's this social association of video games with children, it could be difficult to argue

that videos featuring gameplay are not actually child directed. And since the FTC's decision meant that creators could be held liable for future violations of Kappa, and because these creators are dependent upon ad revenue as part of their income,

that gets to be a big problem. If kids are watching the videos, then that means the kids are also being served advertisements, and if that's happening, it means that there's a chance those kids are having some form of personal identification shared with those advertising parties without parental consent, and thus we get back to the violation of Kappa. It doesn't matter that the creators themselves wouldn't have access

to that personal information. Just by serving as the conduit through which kids data could be hoovered up by an advertiser, the creator would be on the hook. That means that that content creator on YouTube could potentially have to pay up to forty two thousand dollars per video that violates

the rules, which is a big ouch. In January twenty YouTube put the new rules in place, and videos that were either selected as being child directed or that were subsequently determined to be child directed would have their various features turned off. For example, comments would get turned off for those videos because the comment section could serve as a means for someone to collect data about members of

the audience. So these videos would no longer have personalized ads because of course, those ads depend upon tracking personal data, so you can't have a personalized ad if that's not allowed, so child directed videos can't use that. So instead the ads would be contextually appropriate based upon the content of

the video. Other monetization features, which include stuff like a merchandise option, those would also be turned off because those require users to handover information in order to interact with those features, so those were not allowed. Playlists, the mini player notifications, all of these features would be turned off as well. That also means that these videos would be

adversely affected when it comes to YouTube's recommendation engine. Videos that get a lot of engagement tend to go up on those lists, but the child directed stuff by default, has a lot of those different features that affect metrics turned off, so that leaves the creators with a disadvantage. Their content is less likely to be seen and discovered, which in turn means lower revenues for those content creators.

And that's kind of where we are now. It's it's a rough place because on the one hand, you certainly see the FTCs point in that you don't want children to be exploited. You don't want companies to be collecting data about kids when there's no real accountability there. You definitely want the parents to be involved in all of this, and it's very easy for parents to be left out of the loop, even well intentioned and you know, attentive

parents can be left out of the loop. So there does need to be some sort of measures in place, and it's not necessarily I can't really blame YouTube for passing these rules. I know a lot of YouTube creators were really upset when YouTube made these announcements, but the company has an obligation as well, and ultimately is trying to protect content creators because those are the people who are going to be held responsible if they're found in

violation of KAPPA. I also feel for the content creators though, because a lot of them are creating content that they never intended to be directed towards children, and yet sometimes children end up kind of, you know, latching on to that content. Well, what does the creator supposed to do about that? Because they're in the business of making stuff that they're trying to entertain people with. They're not necessary early intending it for kids, but kids are coming to

watch it. That really puts them in a in a tight spot too. So it's tough. Like, there's no easy answer to this. Uh, there are a lot of competing motivations and and obligations going on here, and there's not really a simple way forward. So while we are in a in a bit of a mess. I'm not certain that there's really a neat way of doing this. If you think otherwise, I'm curious to hear your thoughts. You

can reach out to me on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff hs W. I'm sure I'll do more episodes that relate to privacy and technology and the ways that those are in conflict with one another, and what we can expect from that and what maybe we should do about it. I'm sure I'll do a lot more of those in the future, but I suspect that next week we're going to be covering some totally different topics, So stay tuned for that and I'll tell to again really soon. Y Text Stuff is an I

Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.