Home > News

YouTube Lawsuit in UK Claims Violation of Children’s Privacy

By Laura Tucker
News Youtube Childrens Privacy Featured

YouTube is facing a lawsuit in the United Kingdom that claims it violates children’s privacy. Parent company Google should both know better and know how to fight this. It’s similar to a suit that was brought in the U.S. not too long ago.

Prior YouTube Lawsuit

Just last year the Federal Trade Commission in the U.S. filed a lawsuit against YouTube, charging it violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act known as COPPA.

The federal COPPA law imposes restrictions on the collection and use of the personal data of children aged 12 and under. The law states that websites, apps, and digital platforms that collect data from children under 13 are required to post a privacy policy and get a parent’s consent, give parents the option to opt out of having their kids’ information shared, to let parents review their children’s data, and follow sound policies for data storage and retention.

Users do not have to be logged in or registered on YouTube to view most videos, meaning there’s no way it has of not allowing children to have access. The FTC said in its complaint that YouTube courted toy companies Mattel and Hasbro by stating, “YouTube was unanimously voted as the favorite website for kids 2 to 12” and “93 percent of tweens visit YouTube to watch videos.”

News Youtube Childrens Privacy Girl

Yet, a Google employee wrote, “We don’t have users that are below 13 on YouTube and platform/site in general audience, so there is no channel/content that is child-directed, and no COPPA compliance is needed.”

You can’t have it both ways – it can’t be very popular with kids while also not having kids visiting. Google and the FTC reached a $170 million settlement.

The UK Lawsuit

You would think Google would have learned their lesson last year. Duncan McCann, a tech researcher, filed a lawsuit in the U.K.’s High Court alleging that YouTube knowingly violated children’s privacy laws. The suit seeks damages in excess of £2.5 billion (approximately $3.2 billion). McCann is serving as representative claimant, which makes it similar to a class-action suit in the U.S.

“YouTube, and its parent company Google, are ignoring laws designed to protect children,” wrote Foxglove, a U.K. tech advocacy group backing the claim.

News Youtube Children's Privacy Desktop

“They know full well that millions of children watch YouTube. They’re making money from unlawfully harvesting data about these young children as they watch YouTube videos — and then running highly targeted adverts designed to influence vulnerable young minds,” continued Foxglove.

Just like in the U.S., Google defended itself by saying YouTube is not intended for users under the age of 13. “We launched the YouTube Kids app as a dedicated destination for kids and are always working to better protect kids and families ob YouTube,” claimed Google.

The lawsuit points to the same “gotcha” that the U.S. lawsuit did, the boasting of children’s use of YouTube to Mattel and Hasbro. It also added a U.K. government report from last February that discovered about 75 percent of U.K. children ages five to 15 watch YouTube, and around half of U.K. preschoolers aged three and four do the same.

Foxglove points to a U.K. law that is similar to COPPA: “We think it’s unlawful because YouTube processes the data of every child who uses the service – including kids under 13. They profit from this data, as they are paid by advertisers to place targeted advertising on their YouTube website.

News Youtube Childrens Privacy Baby

“They do all this without getting explicit consent from the children’s parents. Under the GDPR and U.K. law, corporations can’t process the data of kids under 13 ‘at all’ without explicit parental consent. Parents haven’t agreed to many ways YouTube takes kids’ data.”

The children’s privacy lawsuit was filed on behalf of more than 5 million children in England and Wales and seeks compensation of between £100 and £500 for every child who watched YouTube content since May 25, 2018 – the day the GDPR went into effect.

“Google’s drive to profit from kids’ attention has turned corners of YouTube into a weird technicolored nightmare,” said Cori Crider, Foxglove director. “The real price of YouTube’s ‘free’ services is kids addicted, influenced, and exploited by Google. It’s already unlawful to data-mine children under 13. but Google won’t clean up its act until forced by the courts.”

The YouTube lawsuit isn’t the only Google product to face children’s privacy complaints. Read on to learn about a complaint lodged with the FTC over Google Play Store allowing “inappropriate” kids apps.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.