
YouTube under federal investigation over allegations it violates kids' privacy - jmsflknr
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/06/19/facing-federal-investigation-youtube-is-considering-broad-changes-childrens-content/
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fyoving
The author keeps conflating the "hate speech" talking points with what this
investigation is actually about, it's like they can't help but pad the article
with all their google grievances.

It sounds like this is due to COPPA complaints because a lot of kids watch
youtube videos and apparently they are not supposed to, but if youtube was
found culpable then everyone would because COPPA is a mess.

~~~
verroq
I don't see how this is youtube's fault at all.

It's not their problem that kids are violating TOS. Maybe parents shouldn't
let youtube babysit their children.

~~~
colechristensen
I am experiencing quite a bit of the opposite from "let youtube babysit their
children" in many different parents that treat video like some sort of poison
which is a curiosity to me (I am not a parent).

I have been thinking more about dopamine or motivation and satisfaction in
myself. I get it, satisfying that craving with any one thing too much is bad.
Having satisfaction for that craving always on demand is bad. That
satisfaction comes in many forms some which people say are "bad for you" some
"good for you" some people disagree (in any category: exercising, eating,
socializing, mind altering substances, television, youtube, social media,
work, video games, reading, etc.)

Not very many people get a high from boredom, so a good measure of it probably
fits in a good life, but that has its limits too.

Whenever I hear too many people have the same opinion about something "bad for
you" that can't be explained without hand-waving I get very suspicious.

~~~
seventhtiger
YouTube harms children in just the same way as it harms adults. The difference
is that children are more susceptible. What is considered a normal religious
or political argument between adults can be considered brain washing if
directed at children.

They do not possess the mental capacities or world experience to be able to
handle arbitrary videos. And the fact that it's arbitrary is exactly the
issue. My young siblings watch YouTube, and I will say the best children's
content on YouTube is better than the best children's content that was
available on TV in my team. There are amazing channels out there with ethical,
educational, entertaining, wholesome content I wish I had access to when I was
their age.

Children's cultural consumption must be curated by the parents or a trusted
party. YouTube will take kids down arbitrary rabbit holes that can take them
to violent, political, radical, targeted, or even genuinely disturbing videos.
Adults can contextualize what they see, or disengage, and even then we see the
negative effects. Subjecting children to that is not just bad parenting, it's
bad in the sense that dystopia is bad in science fiction. It is poison.

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mr_toad
The hypocrisy in these articles criticising social media for tracking people
when the news sites are stuffed to the gills with trackers is starting to get
annoying.

~~~
save_ferris
I'm not sure that's an entirely fair comparison to make for a couple reasons:
A) nobody pays to read the news anymore, and B) Facebook controls its ad
network.

If WaPo or any other news publication decided to turn off ads out of moral
obligation to prove a point, they'd be digging their own graves. You're
essentially arguing that they should commit economic suicide if they truly
care about ad tracking. Our culture isn't willing to spend as much on news
content as we do Netflix, and that's just a sad reality.

Facebook, Youtube, etc. OTOH have built very profitable advertising systems
that form the foundation of their entire business. They fully control these ad
networks and all their data. And in this case, it sounds like YouTube may have
violated COPPA, which is a totally different level of moral failure than
choosing to put up ads.

~~~
Nasrudith
Umm you do realize Youtube is free to the end user? That makes the two exactly
comparable in business model.

~~~
save_ferris
Again, YouTube controls its own ad network. It has full control over what
advertising JS is being served to users. It’s also a technology-first company,
where advanced web application development is a core competency.

News publications aren’t like this at all. They’re embedding Adsense or some
other third party ad widgets, probably at the direction of management. They’re
serving whatever that black box ad API returns, which could be a lot of
things. I haven’t really looked that hard, but are you aware of an ad network
that pays comparably to Google that pledges not to track people? It’s kinda
hard to imagine that such a thing exists, given the ad industry’s pervasive
encroachment on privacy.

Also, most publications I’ve interacted with don’t have technical stakeholders
at the executive level, and web developers are a back-of-the-house role.
They’re not nearly as technically capable as a YouTube

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ronilan
I'm not a native speaker, but this sounds strange:

> _" YouTube has a huge problem,” said Dylan Collins, chief executive of
> SuperAwesome. “They clearly have huge amounts of children using the
> platform, but they can’t acknowledge their presence.”_

Children is a countable noun. I think saying _" huge number of children"_ is
better. For contrast money is a mass noun. _" generating huge amount of
money"_ would be appropriate use for that term.

Maybe I'm wrong though.

~~~
sitharus
I'd agree with you, though in modern english the countable/uncountable
distinction is getting blurred (see less/fewer for example). Just part of the
evolution of language I guess.

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btown
> SuperAwesome, the company that commissioned the PWC report, helps technology
> companies provide services without violating COPPA or European child-privacy
> legal restrictions against the tracking of children. “YouTube has a huge
> problem,” said Dylan Collins, chief executive of SuperAwesome. “They clearly
> have huge amounts of children using the platform, but they can’t acknowledge
> their presence.”

I'm trying to make my mind up about SuperAwesome's ethical position here. On
the one hand, they're investing their own resources into the groundwork for an
investigation that could lead to better protections for children; on the other
hand, they could benefit massively from a situation where YouTube is forced to
use a product like theirs universally, rather than the current situation where
they sell their product to individual channels/brands. On the other other
hand, SuperAwesome benefiting from this situation makes them more able to
protect children on platforms other than YouTube; on the other other other
hand, there's something weird about this not-quite-extortion.

Will we see consulting firms in the future offering "we will find your
competitors' obscure GDPR violations and help you form nonprofits to report
them to authorities and lobby for the prioritization of those cases"? Is this
the world we want to live in? In a world where corporations have the power to
shut down competitors with regulatory madness, is this the optimal balance of
innovation and regulation to maximally increase [insert utility function
here]?

~~~
tareqak
Couldn't the same question about Google's ethical position and their reasons
behind developing the Chrome browser? And, as a follow on, couldn't you also
ask the same question about YouTube's ethical position in its participation in
killing IE6 [0]?

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678)

Update: To finish the thought, neither Google nor SuperAwesome are neutral
when it comes to pursuing objectives that also help others besides themselves.

~~~
abugheratwork
Yes.

...go on?

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_eht
I bet there will be fines involved.

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bloaf
Youtube is just following its own policy: "[we] specifically prohibit videos
alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination,
segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age"

So because they cannot justify exclusion of people based on age, they violate
everyone's privacy equally.

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RIMR
I've been looking into this problem too, and you can find more information
here:
[https://twitter.com/MarcusMcFart/status/1137562323512487938](https://twitter.com/MarcusMcFart/status/1137562323512487938)

~~~
noobermin
What you posted is quite alarming, but I'm not sure it's related. This is
about privacy, not pedophiles.

