Imagine you had 100k in the bank. That would be like a $25 late payment fee.
But on top of that, it’s $200m into the black hole that is our dysfunctional and bloated federal government. How do The Impacted children whose privacy was violated actually benefit.
It’s all ridiculous.
> Imagine you had 100k in the bank. That would be like a $25 late payment fee.
No, it isn't. A company's valuation is not money in the bank. The proper comparison is to profit.
> The settlement would be the largest civil penalty ever obtained by the F.T.C. in a children’s privacy case. It dwarfs the previous record fine of $5.7 million for children’s privacy violations the agency levied this year against the owners of TikTok, a social video-sharing app.
This was a warning to YouTube, but from their perspective, there's clearly a subtext of "we're not afraid to raise the fines, next time could be a lot worse".
That’s not why they left
If you had 100k in the bank, you could write a check to someone for 100k.
Can Google write a check to someone for $800B ?
As a species, humans are getting better at using our susceptibility of the short term pleasures to operate businesses, but the long term effects are probably not going to be desirable.
Why don’t we hear about their internal protests to management and sit outs, etc? If they’re getting fined, it’s more than just public opinion and advocacy it’s preventing illegal activity.
I'm guessing you're outside the US since YouTube controls the trending tab pretty closely there.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/youtube-for-kids-videos-prob...
Beyond that, if they can type, it’s fairly trivial to find softcore porn, death, gore, and weirdness on YouTube.
The fact is, the fine needs to be multiples of quarterly revenue. It needs to be so high not to destroy the company, but enough to make it limp and force it to borrow money to make it through. THEN these will be taken seriously. Until then, these aren't fines. These are price tags for unethical, law-breaking behavior, and these companies are more than happy to pay it.
No. It does not need to be so damn high.
YouTube is aware of the warning, and yes it likely deserves another (order of magnitude larger) fine if they do nothing. But arbitrary fines right out of the gate just hurt everyone.
0: https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-still-doesnt-make-go...
1: https://fortune.com/2016/10/18/youtube-profits-ceo-susan-woj...
Be interesting how the industry and various platforms navigate this whole area, but I'm mindful that they may well just cut them off period as just less hassle for them.
But the area of concern I was raising was such walls being used for no other reason other than risk liability exposure dictated by liability insurance costs. That with age verification systems that are that do credable checks being an area of growth thru demand. Such systems will become easier to implement and the ability to just lie, becomes much more complicated. Hence people being cut off, not thru legal reasons, but for effect - accountants. That's the worry I was raising.
You're literally talking about a video you let your child watch, while bemoaning the FCC needing to step in.
> The fact that YouTube can go here and say their platform is only intended for 13 year olds and up is a joke
The joke is that you understand YouTube is for 13 year olds and up, and you still allow your child on there. Personal responsibility needs to come first.
> They are marketing towards kids and I can’t stand it.
What kind of home router do you have. I'll show you how to block YouTube. Your mom can do similar things at home. There are plenty of blocking solutions out there. Which ones have you tried?
The comment about moms blocking YouTube is a bit ridiculous. Seems hard to believe likelihood of finding one could be higher than the likelihood of finding a kid who can work around it.
Uploading cartoon nursery rhymes and having an ad for drug trafficking come up is idiotic.
But other video providers can make sure that video and the ads placed against that video is suitable for children. I can let a 7 year old sit and watch uk ITV kids content for an hour and I know it'll be fine. I cannot do that for YouTube, because YT ignores the regulatory framework.
That framework is largely voluntary, so sure they don't _have_ to comply with it. But whenever this comes up (especially with taxes) people say "if you don't like non-compliance with voluntary regulation just change the law". And then, when the law is changed (eg, GDPR), people lose their shit and talk about how restrictive the law is.
Also is there any parental consent thing going on here as well with how YouTube words it?
I remember seeing plenty of adult ads as a kid watching TV at night time watching with my parents. The morning kids shows and kids channels always had ads for children of course. Id imagine it's in YouTubes interest not to show kids adult ads as well, most adults probably aren't sitting around watching the same shows with them to make the adult ads useful.
Also YouTube Kids has no quality controls. It uses more bandwidth, due to our hires tablet display I guess, than any other device in our household. Very annoying when on capped LTE on a trip.
We, the parents, should of course try to minimize the amount of time our kids spend with youtube or in general with phones/tablets/TVs.
EVERYTHING that deals with children whether directly or indirectly is strictly regulated, and rightly so.
Television programming as an example, for 70 years only permits certain ads to be displayed on children's shows.
YouTube should be regulated by the FCC in regards to this and very easily can have a checkbox for advertisers and providers to check that says the content is for under 13 or not.
I've complained to the UK regulator about gambling ads placed in children's content and they are paying attention.
They say it's hard because YouTube forbids (because COPPA) anyone under 13 from having an account, which means those children use their parent's accounts, and so the demographics used by the advertisers are skewed.
However, they did take action against every single gambling company I complained about because the ads were placed against children's content.
Does that still happen if you actually pay for the service via Prermium subscription? Or only if you want to use it completely free and paying nothing?
It's almost as if they're doing it deliberately. They're begging for competition to take over their unprofitable business. Nobody wants to step up.
A whole lot of major YouTube channels who are constantly attacked by false copyright claims or have to push product placements due to no ads would love to push users to a better platform. So marketing wouldn't be impossible.
They could also push privacy and fine tuned data controls which helps with kids.
There's enough of a market for two to exist.
Maybe with some type of semi decentralized platform approach so individual hosts who deal with copyright poorly can take the hit, making the system more resilient. Chrome style apps and mobile clients could be the interface and the ad/patreon system is controlled by the primary software developer but the rest is an open protocol with a linear license for non commercial stuff (at least non commercial as far as not competing with the monetization platform). The network effects of managing the ad buyers, subscriber accounts with credit cards and one click subs could stave off the competition without fully controlling the full video network and hosts.
What in the hell is Google doing, and why do they suck at this so bad? I can imagine so many better product experiences. Why can't they get their act together?
Source?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-f...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/fortune.com/2016/10/18/youtube-... (not sure how to un-ampify this)
Posturing above the rest of the community isn't helpful either. If you're posting here, you're as much "HN" as anyone.
