Harvesting Kids’ Personal Info.
Video is obviously the way digital marketing is headed. See our post below. We site data from ChiefMarketer.com. What also struck us as interesting was this data point: “74% of U.S. consumers 13 years and older watch streaming or online video* at least weekly and 41 percent watch daily.”
What are the 13-year-old kids “consuming” online? Likely YouTube.
This from the NY Times,” Google agreed … to pay a record $170 million fine and make changes to protect children’s privacy on YouTube, as regulators said the video site had knowingly and illegally harvested personal information from children and used it to profit by targeting them with ads.”
photo by Christian Wiediger
And, “even as YouTube told some advertising firms that they did not have to comply with the children’s privacy law because YouTube did not have viewers under 13. YouTube then made millions of dollars by using the information harvested from children to target them with ads, regulators said.”
So yes, those videos seem to have turned those 13-year-old kids into consumers - consuming what they find on YouTube. A 13-year-old is considered an adult for the purposes of targeted advertising, so that likely opens those kids up to a whole lot MORE targeting.