YouTube: Illegally Tracking Children’s Data

Abstract

Google subsidiary, YouTube, has collected data of children users without the consent of parents and then sold the data to advertisers. The Federal Trade Commission fined Google $170 million in what was the largest fine in Google’s history. Absent a plausible public explanation, YouTube and its parent company risk anger and alienation from investors, application users, parents groups, and perhaps further regulatory oversight from the Congress of the United States.

This case was prepared for inclusion in Sage Business Cases primarily as a basis for classroom discussion or self-study, and is not meant to illustrate either effective or ineffective management styles. Nothing herein shall be deemed to be an endorsement of any kind. This case is for scholarly, educational, or personal use only within your university, and cannot be forwarded outside the university or used for other commercial purposes.

2024 Sage Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved

You are not authorized to view Teaching Notes. Please contact your librarian for instructor access or sign in to your existing instructor profile.

Resources

Appendix A: List of Channels on Which YouTube Ran Behavioral Advertisements in 2018

Sr. #

YouTube Channel

Subscribers (M)

1

Little Baby Bum

20.60

2

CookieSwirlC

12.20

3

Toyscouter

9.57

4

Barbie

7.58

5

Bratayley

7.31

6

Masha and the Bear

6.80

7

EvanTubeHD

6.45

8

Sandaroo Kids

6.33

9

Dreamworks TV

6.23

10

Cartoon Network

6.02

11

Hasbro

3.63

12

Hot Wheels

2.05

13

Monster High

1.87

14

Thomas & Friends

1.23

Total

97.87

Appendix B: Extracted Segments From Alphabet Inc. 2019 SEC Form 10-K

Business: How we make money. The goal of our advertising business is to deliver relevant ads at just the right time and to give people useful commercial information, regardless of the device they’re using. We also provide advertisers with tools that help them better attribute and measure their advertising campaigns across screens. Our advertising solutions help millions of companies grow their businesses, and we offer a wide range of products across screens and formats. We generate revenues primarily by delivering both performance advertising and brand advertising.

Performance Advertising: creates and delivers relevant ads that users will click on, leading to direct engagement with advertisers. Most of our performance advertisers pay us when a user engages in their ads. Performance advertising lets our advertisers connect with users while driving measurable results.

Our ads tools allow performance advertisers to create simple text-based ads that appear on Google properties and the properties of Google Network Members. In addition, Google Network Members use our platforms to display relevant ads on their properties, generating revenues when site visitors view or click on the ads. We continue to invest in our advertising programs and make significant upgrades.

Brand Advertising: helps enhance users’ awareness of and affinity with advertisers’ products and services, through videos, text, images, and other interactive ads that run across various devices. We help brand advertisers deliver digital videos and other types of ads to specific audiences for their brand-building marketing campaigns.

We have built a world-class ad technology platform for brand advertisers, agencies, and publishers to power their digital marketing businesses. We aim to ensure great user experiences by serving the right ads at the right time and by building deep partnerships with brands and agencies. We also seek to improve the measurability of brand advertising, so advertisers know when their campaigns are effective.

We have allocated substantial resources to stopping bad advertising practices and protecting users on the web. We focus on creating the best advertising experiences for our users and advertisers in many ways, ranging from filtering out invalid traffic, removing billions of bad ads from our systems every year to closely monitoring the sites, apps, and videos where ads appear and blacklisting them when necessary to ensure that ads do not fund bad content.

Beyond our advertising business, we also generate revenues in other areas. For instance, we generate revenue when users purchase digital content like apps, movies and music through Google Play or when they purchase our Made by Google hardware devices. Businesses also pay for the use of our cloud services like Google Cloud Platform and G Suite.

Risk Factors: We are subject to increasing regulatory scrutiny as well as changes in public policies governing a wide range of topics that may negatively affect our business.

We and other companies in the technology industry have experienced increased regulatory scrutiny recently. For instance, various regulatory agencies are reviewing aspects of our search and other businesses. This can lead to increased scrutiny from other regulators and legislators, that may affect our reputation, brand and third-party relationships. Such reviews have and may in the future also result in substantial regulatory fines, changes to our business practices and other penalties, which could negatively affect our business and results of operations. We continue to cooperate with regulatory authorities around the world in investigations they are conducting with respect to our business.

This case was prepared for inclusion in Sage Business Cases primarily as a basis for classroom discussion or self-study, and is not meant to illustrate either effective or ineffective management styles. Nothing herein shall be deemed to be an endorsement of any kind. This case is for scholarly, educational, or personal use only within your university, and cannot be forwarded outside the university or used for other commercial purposes.

2024 Sage Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved

locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles