A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday revived a lawsuit accusing Alphabet’s Google and several other companies of violating the privacy of children under 13 by tracking their YouTube activity without parental consent, in order to target them. send advertisements.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle said Congress had no intention of prejudging state-based privacy claims by passing the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA.
That law empowers the Federal Trade Commission and the Attorneys General, but not private plaintiffs, to regulate the online collection of personal information about children under age 13.
The lawsuit alleged that Google’s data collection violated similar state laws, and that YouTube content providers such as Hasbro, Mattel, Cartoon Network and DreamWorks Animation lured children to their channels knowing they would be tracked.
In July 2021, U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman in San Francisco dismissed the lawsuit, saying the federal privacy law pre-empts plaintiffs’ claims under the laws of California, Colorado, Indiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Tennessee.
But in Wednesday’s 3-0 decision, circuit judge Margaret McKeown said the wording of the federal law made it “nonsensical” to assume that Congress intended to bar prosecutors from invoking state laws aimed at the same alleged misconduct.
The case was returned to Freeman to consider other grounds Google and the content providers might have for dropping the case.
Lawyers from Google and the content providers did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The children’s lawyers did not immediately respond to similar requests.
In October 2019, Google agreed to pay $170 million (approximately Rs. 1,400 crore) to settle charges brought by the FTC and New York Attorney General Letitia James that YouTube illegally collected personal data from children without the consent of the parents.
The plaintiffs in the San Francisco case said Google didn’t begin complying with COPPA until January 2020.
Their lawsuit sought damages for YouTube users aged 16 and under from July 2013 to April 2020.
The case is Jones et al v. Google LLC et al, 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, no. 21-16281.
© Thomson Reuters 2022
