YouTube has faced a number of child safety
issues this year. In one case, comments that
pedophiles left on innocuous family videos of
kids pushed YouTube to turn off comments on
nearly all videos featuring kids.
The FTC imposed a smaller fine of $5.7 million
on video site Musical.ly, now called TikTok,
earlier this year after finding it illegally collected
personal information about kids.
Google is already under a 2011 agreement with
the FTC that barred it from mispresenting its
privacy policy and subjected the company to
20 years of regular, independent privacy audits.
Google was fined $22.5 million in 2012 for
violating that settlement when the FTC found
it improperly used tracking cookies on Apple’s
Safari browser.
The FTC’s fine against YouTube now needs to be
approved by a federal court in Washington.