YouTube Faces UK Watchdog for Violating New Law Protecting Children

TikTok is not the only social media platform the UK is finding faults on.

The country's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) recently received a complaint from a charity group against Alphabet's YouTube for allegedly unlawfully gathering data on children.

The UK previously enacted a law that guides how the country's data protection rules apply to digital services aimed at children, per Bloomberg.

YouTube Child Privacy Violation Complaint Details

YouTube is facing a complaint from campaigner Duncan McCann, who says that the site is gathering data about the videos children watch, where they are watching them from, and what device they are using to watch them, per the BBC.

He added that plenty of children watch YouTube videos on family devices, where the data YouTube allegedly collected can be gathered by default because it is not registered as a children's account.

While McCann is acting in a personal capacity, he does work for the campaign group 5Rights Foundation, a group that championed the ICO's Children Code.

The code states that companies must provide high levels of privacy for children by default and not use design features that encourage them to give more data about them.

Breaking the code, which the UK government enacted in 2020, penalizes lawbreakers as much as 4% of a company's annual global revenue.

When asked about YouTube's management, McCann said that he'd make the company reform its data-gathering policy in such a way that it doesn't collect and process any unnecessary information.

"The best way to ensure that they are only collecting the data of adults who are properly consenting would be to have a process where adults can sign in to the tracking, recommendation systems, profiling, targeted ads," McCann said.

He also mentioned that he believes that "a minority" of users would choose to do so.

Meanwhile, the ICO mentioned it would consider the complaint from McCann to protect the country's children.

Stephen Bonner, a deputy commissioner at the ICO, said that the agency expects children's data to be protected online and that it would take action if that is not the case.

YouTube isn't the target of a formal investigation yet.

YouTube's Response On The Complaint

Although YouTube's press team in the UK has yet to respond to inquiries about the complaint, the BBC reports that the company had invested in protecting families, including treating all children's content as though children were viewing it, even on an adult's account.

A spokesperson mentioned that YouTube is committed to continuing its engagement with the ICO on the protection of children's data, along with key stakeholders, including children, parents, and child-protection experts.

The company had been through this road before in 2019. At the time, the Federal Trade Commission fined YouTube $170 million for violating the Children's Privacy Law - $136 million to the FTC and $34 million to New York, per the FTC's announcement.

The social media platform also reminds people that it offers a separate children's app called YouTube Kids that provides a "supervised experience" that requires parental consent, though 89% of the UK's children use YouTube's main app to watch videos in 202, per regulator Ofcom.