Children's advocates ask FTC to investigate Google for targeting ads to kids

abcnews.go.com:

Children's advocacy groups including Fairplay and Common Sense Media are asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Google, saying the tech giant serves personalized ads to kids on YouTube despite federal law prohibiting the practice

Children’s advocacy groups including Fairplay and Common Sense Media are asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Google, saying the tech giant serves personalized ads to kids on YouTube despite federal law prohibiting the practice.

The letter follows a report from The New York Times last week that found that ads on YouTube may have led to the online tracking of children. The federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, requires kid-oriented websites to get parents’ consent before collecting personal information of children under 13.

In response to the Times report, Google said last week that it did not run personalized ads on children’s videos and that its ad practices fully complied with COPPA. When ads appear on children’s videos, the company told the Times, they are based on webpage content, not targeted to user profiles.

But Wednesday's letter to the FTC — also signed by the nonprofit Center for Digital Democracy — says Fairplay, as well as independent ad buyers, conducted follow-up research suggesting that the ads are, in fact, personalized. They did this by running test ad campaigns on YouTube, selecting series of users of attributes and affinities for ad targeting and instructed Google to only run the ads on “made for kids” channels.

In theory, the groups say, these test campaigns should have resulted in zero placements, because under Google and YouTube’s policy, no personalized ads are supposed to run on “made for kids” videos. But Fairplay says