An appeals court has reinstated a lawsuit accusing Google, YouTube, DreamWorks and a handful of toy makers of tracking the YouTube activity of children under the age of 13. Protection laws do not prohibit litigation under individual state privacy laws.
COPPA, passed in 1998 and amended in 2012, requires websites to obtain parental consent for the collection and distribution of personally identifiable information of children under the age of 13. law.
Several states across the United States have enacted laws similar to COPPA. The revived lawsuit, citing laws in California, Colorado, Indiana, and Massachusetts, sees Hasbro, DreamWorks, Mattel, and Cartoon Network illegally use YouTube channels to target children with ads. He claims to have lured him in.
A federal judge in San Francisco dismissed the first lawsuit, ruling that COPPA prohibits individuals from suing companies for breaches of privacy. In a unanimous decision, the Ninth Circuit judges hearing the appeal disagreed with the district court’s reasoning. COPPA is not the only route to enforcement, according to the ruling.
Justice Margaret McKeon said, “Because the prohibition of ‘inconsistent’ state laws implicitly maintains ‘consistent’ It would be nonsense to assume that it was intended to simultaneously eliminate the remedies for
This isn’t the first time YouTube has run into legal problems with its handling of children’s data. A subsidiary of Alphabet said in 2019 he was fined $170 million by the FTC and the New York State Attorney General for violating COPPA.
The lawsuit, which seeks damages for seven years from 2013 to 2020, is now before the District Court.
