About five million British kids under 13 years old were allegedly exploited on Youtube, as per the class-action lawsuit filed against the video-sharing platform. Under U.K. and E.U. laws, if a company wants to save user data in their system, they need to seek consent to the users affected. Youtube, however, failed to do so.
The United Kingdom court wants Youtube to face charges
Google, as the mother company of Youtube, will be the one to face the possible $3.1 billion class-action lawsuit. Once successful, all children and their parents will be compensated of around $640 each.
A Youtube spokesman, however, defended the issue and said that they did not exploit any info from their children users in UK.
As a matter of fact, they clarified that "Youtube [as a platform] is not for children under 13 years old." According to the post, Youtube's kids' platform called Youtube Kids app should be the one that these children must be using.
"We don't comment on pending litigation. YouTube is not for children under the age of 13. We launched the YouTube Kids app [in 2015] as a dedicated destination for kids and have made further changes that allow us to protect kids and families on YouTube better," said on the report.
Google may also argue that a lot of changes in privacy alerts were already applied by the platform over the years now.
These were a series of changes that it introduced last year to improve parents' notification, limit data collection, and restrict personalized adverts.
So far, Google nor Youtube have not yet updated their statements on the matter.
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Jamie Pancho
