>>29713703>selling personal data mined out of the kids on youtube to other companies.Yes and no. I work in a field related to tech policy/regulation, and remember that era.
I wrote a fucking two-post dissertation, and then accidentally hit my back button so I'll rewrite it a little shorter.
Yes: YouTube fucked up.
No: YouTube didn't go seek out kids' social security numbers or names, sort of. They had (some) policies to keep from getting it, because some lawyers and some engineers knew better.
YouTube is big, so let's be clear who fucked up. The product teams (people who design the app, engineers who build it) had a decent set of policies and assumptions. Not perfect, but decent. The lawyers even checked those assumptions and policies. Then the world changed around them. Then, after a bit, their sales people went and screwed the pooch. But even that didn't matter right away. The fuckup didn't come into play until after something else got the gears on the outrage machine grinding.
But more on the sales people at the end.
The initial outrage wasn't about selling kids' "data", it was the "Elsa loves Spiderman" videos.
Chinese and Eastern European content farms were pumping out THOUSANDS of videos of TTS nursery rhymes with of random 3D models of literally anything in them. In an algorithmic race-to-the-bottom you got some dystopian copyright violations: a low-poly model of Elsa fucked a low-poly model of Spiderman. And that was the "normal" stuff.
Once the outrage machine spun up, the Eye of Sauron that is political outrage eventually found a real violation. A lot of kids were using YouTube, but you can't sign up for YouTube without saying "I am over 13 years old", and so on. So they were using their parents' accounts, no surprise. However the CYA of "I am over 13 years old" stops covering their ass when they know about it (and we/politicians find out they know).
How did we know that they knew the kids were using parents' accounts?
Remember those sales people?
Turns out once they knew that kids were using the app, the sales people went to toy companies, candy companies, etc. and say "Yo we got ALL OF YOUR AUDIENCE here. You want some of this? You know you do! Trust me bro!" and that's where they fucked up. That's technically a version of "wanted a fast buck" but it's a little more roundabout than a specific, mustache-twirling "Haha quick let us round up all of the children!" situation, and the original thing that kicked it off wasn't even the ads, it was Elsa having sex with Spiderman.
