Under the law of Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), it’s illegal to collect data from under-aged (under 13) kids and target them with personalized ads. Under this violation, YouTube was fined for $170 million. This is just a little sum for Google, but the dent it made on YouTube’s reputation should be considered here.
The Crosswalk Team
The recent report is that YouTube has grouped a team of 40 members whose work will be of screening all the videos which are aimed at underaged kids! Naming the team as Crosswalk (referencing dangerous content streets in the site), this proposal went far enough to be made official but dropped at last minute because of CEO Susan Wojcicki’s choice. She defended her decision by saying that such moderations would make the site too much like a media company, resembling the same old media houses that are accountable for threats, hate speech, copyrights etc. Earlier this year, they’ve determined to take stronger and reasonable actions that are related to children content. And watching every video that’s being directed for kids is hard, considering the upload rate of 500 videos per minute! May this year of 2019 isn’t that good for YouTube, as the user-led content streaming platform has been facing enough heat from regulators and activists over privacy and copyright infringements cases. A couple of days ago, YouTube is warned for blocking from Russia over unauthorized uploads of copyrighted materials and earlier this month, YouTube’s CEO revealed that she won’t allow her kids to watch YouTube, but only the YouTube kids that too, for with a time cap. Numerous Allegations of such are freaking YouTube recently and its interesting to see how it ducks all of them in future. Greg Alkalay, CEO of children’s media company named BatteryPOP said,
