Last week, the Federal Trade Commission made clear that child-directed parts of an otherwise general audience service will subject the operator of the service to COPPA. Just six months after the FTC’s record-setting settlement against TikTok, the FTC announced a $170 million fine against Google and its subsidiary YouTube to settle allegations that YouTube had collected personal information from children without first obtaining parental consent, in violation of the FTC’s rule implementing the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). This $170 million fine — $136 million to the FTC and $34 million to the New York Attorney General, with whom the FTC brought the enforcement action — dwarfs the $5.7 million levied against TikTok earlier this year. It is by far the largest amount that the FTC has obtained in a COPPA case since Congress enacted the law in 1998. The settlement puts operators of general-audience websites on notice that they are not automatically excluded from COPPA’s coverage: they are required to comply with COPPA if particular parts of their websites or content (including content uploaded by others) are directed to children under age 13.
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