YouTube paid a record fine for tracking children in 2019

The short answer

In September 2019, Google and its YouTube subsidiary paid a then-record penalty for collecting data from children on channels aimed at them, without asking parents first. The settlement did not remove children's content from YouTube; it required the company to build a system for creators to flag child-directed videos and to stop serving personalised ads on that content without consent. If your child watches YouTube, the practical effect is that clearly child-directed content should not carry the same tracking-based advertising as everything else.

What the evidence says

The Federal Trade Commission and the New York Attorney General alleged that YouTube used persistent identifiers, the cookies and similar markers that track a device across the internet, to serve targeted advertising on channels plainly aimed at children, without the verifiable parental consent the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule requires, according to the FTC's announcement of 4 September 2019. The complaint pointed to YouTube's own marketing to toy and other companies, and internal reviews that identified child-directed channels, as evidence the company knew which content children were watching, even while telling individual channel owners that COPPA compliance was not their concern. The $170 million penalty split $136 million to the FTC and $34 million to New York, the FTC's largest COPPA recovery at the time. Beyond the payment, the case record shows the order required YouTube to build a mechanism for channel owners to identify their content as child-directed, notify them of the resulting obligations, train staff annually on COPPA, and obtain parental consent before collecting children's data going forward. YouTube's own current help documentation, as retrieved on 16 September 2026, describes the resulting system: creators mark a channel or a video as 'made for kids', and made-for-kids content does not carry personalised advertising and loses features such as comments and live chat.

For context

The order changed how YouTube treats content designated child-directed; it relies on creators making an accurate designation rather than on YouTube identifying every child viewer itself, and the help pages warn creators not to rely on automated classification. A child can still watch content a creator has not labelled as made for kids. The settlement addressed advertising and data collection; it did not set rules for what content is appropriate for children to watch or how much time they spend watching it.

A practical next step

You could check whether the channels or videos your child watches most are actually marked as made for kids, since that designation, not how child-friendly a video looks, is what turns off personalised ad tracking.

• Are the channels your child watches most often labelled as made for kids on YouTube?
• Do you know what features, like comments or live chat, disappear on made-for-kids content, and why?
• Would you notice if a channel aimed at children was not labelled that way?

The case set a financial and procedural marker other platforms have had to reckon with since, but its scope was data collection and advertising, not the broader question of what children watch or for how long.