YouTube said to be fined up to $200 million for children’s privacy violations

The Federal Trade Commission has voted to fine Google $150 to $200 million to settle accusations that its YouTube subsidiary illegally collected personal information about children, according to three people briefed on the matter.

The case could have significant repercussions for other popular platforms used by young children in the United States.

The settlement would be the largest civil penalty ever obtained by the FTC in a children’s privacy case. It dwarfs the previous record fine of $5.7 million for children’s privacy violations the agency levied this year against the owners of TikTok, a social video-sharing app.

The settlement would have to be approved by the Justice Department.

The news of the FTC’s settlement with Google comes at a moment when regulators and lawmakers in Washington and the European Union are challenging the power — and the aggressive data-mining practices — of tech giants like Facebook and Google.

The FTC’s agreement with YouTube involves a larger fine than in previous children’s privacy settlements, but the case has renewed complaints from consumer advocates that the agency has generally failed to require privacy violators to make substantive change to their data-mining practices.

“Once again, this FTC appears to have let a powerful company off the hook with a nominal fine for violating users’ privacy online,” Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass, said Friday.

The FTC, which is expected to announce the settlement in September, declined to comment. YouTube declined to comment.

Google has faced scrutiny before over how it collects and uses people’s data. It is already subject to an FTC consent order from 2011 for deceptive data-mining involving its now-defunct social network Buzz.

Whether YouTube’s alleged misuse of children’s data violates that order is not known.

The accusations against YouTube emerged last year after a coalition of more than 20 consumer advocacy groups filed a complaint to the FTC saying that the video platform was violating a federal privacy law by collecting and exploiting the personal information of children.

That law, called the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, prohibits online services aimed at children under 13 from collecting personal details — like a child’s birth date, contact information, photos or precise location — without a parent’s permission. The law also prohibits children’s apps from using persistent identifiers to target youngsters with ads based on their behaviour.

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