Google Employees Violated the Company’s Policy on Targeting Ads to Teenagers
Google has a policy against targeting ads to minors , but it has been noticed. A report from The Financial Times claims that the company’s employees teamed up with Meta to exploit a loophole that allowed them to run YouTube ads selling Instagram to teenagers.
According to the publication, the ad was shown to users marked as “unknown” in Google’s systems, which is believed to refer to users whose age, gender, parental status and household income are unknown. Unfortunately for Google, the publication found that Google can use app downloads and other activity to know “with a high degree of confidence” that the unknown group is overwhelmingly made up of teenagers.
The report goes on to claim that Google employees used the unknown group as a backdoor to target ads to teenagers without technically violating their company’s policies. When the publication contacted Google with its findings, the company pulled the plug on the campaign, canceling plans to roll it out overseas after launching in Canada and testing in the United States.
“We prohibit ad personalization for people under 18,” Google told the FT, saying it would launch an investigation into attempts to circumvent its rules. “We will also take additional action to reassure sales representatives that they should not help advertisers or agencies run campaigns that attempt to circumvent our policies.”
The search giant also tried to limit the damage in a statement to Quartz , saying the campaign was “small in nature.”
While the campaign only violated internal policies and not any (current) laws, news of the loophole comes amid significant legal scrutiny of how companies use children’s data online. Last month, the US Senate passed a bill that would ban targeted advertising to minors, as well as the collection of their data without consent. Additionally, last week the US Department of Justice sued TikTok for illegally collecting data from users under 13 without parental consent.