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New York Fines Viacom, Mattel and Hasbro For Tracking Kids Online (usatoday.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from USA Today: Companies that operate popular kids websites like nickjr.com and barbie.com agreed to a $835,000 settlement and to change their practices after an investigation found the sites were enabled with technology that tracked kids' internet activities. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced his office reached settlements with Viacom, Mattel, Hasbro and JumpStart Games after an investigation into the companies found violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. The investigation, called "Operation Child Tracker," found that websites operated by the companies enabled third-party vendors, such as marketing and advertising companies, to track children's online activity -- which violated federal law. Federal law prohibits the unauthorized collection of children's personal information on websites aimed at children under age 13. Viacom will pay $500,000; Mattel will pay $250,000; and JumpStart will pay $85,000. [Hasbro will not pay a penalty because it is part of a "safe harbor program" through the Federal Trade Commission that already requires more disclosures of web activity, Schneiderman said.]
It is called stalking. Just because you do it via the internet doesn't mean jack.
Because think of the children.
Fucking horseshit. I don't want to be tracked. It shouldn't matter how old I am.
What is the reason for this law?
Why is there an age limit?
Because adults are old enough to give consent, and children aren't. Do you really want the government/nanny state holding your hand all your life?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
But we are never asked for consent.
Viacomm 2015 gross earnings $6.18 billion.
$500,000 fine.
Mattel 2015 gross earnings $2.8 billion.
$250,000 fine.
For an individual earning $100,000 gross income that equates to roughly to $8 and $9 fines respectively*. That will really teach them to think twice about breaking federal law by enabling tracking of children through their sites. What a joke.
* that's assuming the individual is taxed at the same rate as the corporations. Which they aren't. So the relative amount is even lower.
When a site is presumptuous, and says I have to give them that info before they will cough up a download link, or let me see a page, I give them fictitious shit, usually with subtle hints that I don't like what they are doing, like "no@youdontneedthis.org" or something similar.
If they only want to give me the the link via email, I give them the shit email sewer I use for spam, and then never go back to them again afterwards.
If they blast me with cross site tracking super cookies, I blacklist them with no script and ghostery.
I know they take notice of this, because many have started complaining to me that they needs the ad monies. They can get the ad monies from me if they stop using cross site tracking. I don't mind cookies inside their site, or curated ads that don't fire off malicious scripts from north Korea. It is when they are a combination of lazy and entitled, where they just out any old shit ad from any advert whore network, pushing any old JavaScript and any old image type (no really, when you embed an .emf and a .tiff, it is obvious what you are doing, and it is not serving me an ad.) I feel the need to remind them that they need to be more considerate themselves.
I don't want them to warehouse data about me. At all. Ever.
This is not hard, but the insatiable hunger for more and more personal data to use in big data analytics needs to stop, and these clowns don't want it to. They are so used to just collecting it, that the idea that it us illegal to collect from children never dawned on them.
It is a stark wakeup call to the extent of the problem.
I'm not arguing against the spirit of these laws, but it's easy to break them without being nefarious. Including google analytics on a site, common practice in the web industry, with the track demographic data checkbox checked is enough to break these laws.