Last year, the Federal Trade Commission issued a historic $170 million fine to YouTube for alleged violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA). In January 2020, YouTube responded by launching a series of changes to better protect children and their privacy. One of the biggest changes is that content creators must label their videos as “kids content,” and those videos collect limited data to protect minors.
Going from policy to practice, these are some of the herculean questions that policymakers, practitioners, and researchers are grappling with. Homemade slime with Doctor Squish, 5-minute crafts, and Minecraft videos: What constitutes “kids content” and how do content-creators convey this effectively? How does YouTube limit and minimize data collection in practice? What does a reasonable parent-child consent process look like?
These conversations are often led by legal experts, technocrats, and academic researchers. To better understand children’s perspective and intuition of data privacy and collection, we organized a workshop with the end user experts themselves: kids.