YouTube UK Accused of Harvesting the Data of Children
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Loading... - Jordan Thompson
- 16 Mar 2023
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A complaint has been filed with the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) against YouTube by Duncan McCann, a staff member at child advocacy group 5Rights.
In it, he accuses the platform of violating UK data privacy laws that place additional restrictions on the collection of the data of children under 13.
He claims that the website collects information about the videos that kids watch, their locations, and the devices they use.
The Breach of Children’s Data Privacy
Although YouTube's main website is supposedly off-limits to users under 13, McCann's lawsuit claims that the corporation failed to check that younger users were abiding by the rules and only using the main platform with parental permission.
YouTube Kids is a separate app that is available for children under the age of thirteen and has much stricter data processing restrictions than the main platform.
Although YouTube, including YouTube Kids, was used by 89% of children between the ages of 3 and 17 in 2022, only 40% of YouTube users aged three to four exclusively used the Kids app, with the percentage falling even lower for older children.
“Imagine YouTube as an adult stranger following your child ‘online’ with a virtual clipboard recording everything they do,” McCann said in a statement.
“That is what is happening every day and they are not just doing it with your child. They are doing it with up to 5 million other UK children as well, resulting in an enormous amount of personal information being gathered.”, adds McCann.
In addition to stipulating that the data collected from children be destroyed, the complaint requests that the ICO consider ordering the rollback or deletion of any machine learning system trained on the gathered data.
A YouTube spokesperson said: “Over the years, we’ve made investments to protect kids and families, such as launching a dedicated kids app, introducing new data practices for children’s content, and providing more age-appropriate experiences. Read More…
