Google has agreed to pay a $170 million fine ー the largest of its kind ー as part of a settlement over allegations that YouTube violated the law by collecting personal data about children in order to serve them ads.
The terms of the settlement between YouTube-parent Google ($GOOGL) and the FTC and New York state attorney general were announced on Wednesday. Google and YouTube will pay $136 million to the federal government and another $34 million to New York. The FTC says it is the largest penalty ever in a case related to the law known as COPPA, or the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which passed in 1998.
The settlement, which had been expected, "sends a strong message to children's content providers and to platforms about their obligation to comply with the COPPA Rule," said FTC Chair Joseph Simons in an accompanying release. Regulators had alleged that YouTube did not tell the viewers of "child-directed" content that they were being tracked. Under COPPA, sites that are aimed at children must ask for and receive parental consent for any data they collect on children under 13.
While the largest fine under COPPA by an order of magnitude, it is still a fraction of the revenue Google brings in from advertising on YouTube. Alphabet, Google's parent, famously refuses to break out YouTube's financial results in its earnings. Analysts estimate that YouTube brings in as much as $25 billion annually. Google generated $137 billion in revenue last year.
Two FTC members voted against the settlement over concerns that it does no go far enough. One member compared it to the recent $5 billion fine levied against Facebook for its privacy missteps. Commissioner Rohit Chopra wrote that the agreement offered "no individual accountability, insufficient remedies to address the company's financial incentives, and a fine that still allows the company to profit from its lawbreaking. The terms of the settlement were not even significant enough to make Google issue a warning to its investors."
Shares of Alphabet were trading fractionally higher following the announcement.
Joe Cecela, Dream Exchange CEO, explains how they are aiming to form the first minority-controlled company to operate an exchange in U.S. history. Watch!
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
