Disney to pay $10M to settle FTC COPPA mislabeling on YouTube videos

The Walt Disney Company has agreed to pay $10 million to settle a Federal Trade Commission complaint that it failed to properly label some YouTube videos as made for children, allowing the collection of personal data from viewers under 13 and the delivery of targeted advertising, regulators said Tuesday. The FTC said the videos at issue were uploaded between 2020 and 2022 and that the lapse violated the Childrens Online Privacy Protection Act, known as COPPA.

According to the agency's complaint, the mislabeling stemmed in part from Disney's practice of relying on blanket channel-level designations instead of reviewing individual uploads. The FTC said YouTube introduced a process after a 2019 enforcement action requiring content creators to mark videos or channels as made for kids, and that Disney was notified in mid-2020 that YouTube had changed the designations on more than 300 of its videos to made for kids. The company did not, the FTC alleges, adjust its policy to ensure those videos were appropriately flagged.

Under the settlement, Disney must pay the civil penalty and establish a program to review whether videos posted to YouTube should be designated as made for kids. That...