Yesterday as I was checking my email I saw an email talking about COPPA, which stands for (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) which forbids collecting data from children under the age of 13 without explicit consent from their parents witch I have to omit that I just blow it off and moved on to the next e-mail anyway today I signed up for Reddit and I see a post talking about FTC will charge you 42,000$ Per video if it’s not marked as “Kid friendly” content on Youtube witch I thought this is just fake news but guess what this is NOT fake news after doing some research other sites that I do trust is also reporting this.
So what does this mean and who will this affect?
YouTube who is owned by Google is being fined by the FTC, as they said they will be fine Google $170 million over alleged violations of a children’s privacy law, you can read more about that here https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/4/20848949/google-ftc-youtube-child-privacy-violations-fine-170-milliion-coppa-ads.
As a YouTube creator i.e. the public meaning anyone who uploads videos to YouTube could also face which I think is a very hefty fine especially when were talking about per video if it is improperly labeled. The fine per video that is not properly labeled is $42,000.
If you simply use YouTube to like videos, add them to playlists and make a few comments here and there then it will be zero impact and you’ll have nothing to worry about, so most likely you won’t notice any changes other than maybe a few less or no advertisements playing on certain videos.
If you plan on uploading videos to YouTube pretty much nothing will change other than you will be required to indicate whether the video is basically suitable for children or not suitable for children.
If you mark a video that is suitable for children most likely advertisements won’t be displayed, comments disabled however if you mark a video that isn’t suitable for children advertisements will be played, comments if allowed by you and it won’t be available on YouTube for kids.
My personal opinion is I don’t think any children should be allowed to use YouTube, I also don’t think YouTube should be mixing any children content along with other content instead I think they should create a completely separate platform that is specifically targeted to children. I think when stuff is mixed it becomes a hot mess. Perhaps you should call the new platform “KidTube”.
I also don’t think parents should be allowing their children to access the internet unsupervised, just like they say the television shouldn’t be considered to be the electronic babysitter will the computer and internet shouldn’t be any different.
I also don’t think that this piece of legislation is going to be effective, most children today are pretty well knowledgeable when it comes to electronic devices such as cell phones, computers, iPads and tablets and I’m sure they know how to lie about their age which probably most of them do in order to defeat age blocks.
Just like we have created extremely tough gun legislation in California and in Chicago, IL with the theory is that if we create this really tough gun legislation it is going to somehow stop the shootings but the cold hard truth is it hasn’t in fact I think it does very little.
So in conclusion I think this piece of legislation is a piece of legislation that makes us feel good but in reality it’s going to do absolutely nothing to protect.
If we truly want to protect our children, it first starts with supervising children when they are online and becoming knowledgeable in technology. Knowledge is the enemie’s worst nightmare.
I think this piece of legislation is incredibly dangerous because if the FTC can go after a private company like YouTube what stops them from going after websites?
If you think this is good or bad, tell the FTC by going to https://www.regulations.gov/comment?D=FTC-2019-0054-0001