Disney to pay  million to settle FTC criticism over assortment of youngsters’s private information on YouTube


A water tower stands at Walt Disney Studios on June 3, 2025 in Burbank, California.

Mario Tama | Getty Photos

The Walt Disney Firm pays $10 million to settle Federal Commerce Fee allegations that it enabled the illegal assortment of youngsters’s private information on YouTube.

The FTC claimed the corporate allowed information to be collected from children who seen movies directed at kids on YouTube with out notifying mother and father or acquiring their consent.

The criticism alleged that Disney violated the Kids’s On-line Privateness Safety Rule by not labeling some YouTube movies as being made for kids. The company claimed the corporate was capable of accumulate information from viewers of child-directed content material who have been beneath the age of 13 and use it for focused promoting.

In 2019, after a settlement with the FTC, YouTube started requiring content material creators to checklist whether or not uploaded movies have been “made for teenagers” or “not made for teenagers.” The designation ensures that private info just isn’t collected from the “made for teenagers” movies and personalised adverts won’t be served to viewers. Feedback are additionally disabled on these movies.

The proposed settlement would require Disney to pay a $10 million civil penalty, adjust to the youngsters’s information safety rule and implement a program to evaluate whether or not movies posted to YouTube needs to be designated as “made for teenagers.”

“Supporting the well-being and security of children and households is on the coronary heart of what we do,” the corporate stated in an announcement obtained by CNBC. “This settlement doesn’t contain Disney owned and operated digital platforms however moderately is proscribed to the distribution of a few of our content material on YouTube’s platform. Disney has an extended custom of embracing the very best requirements of compliance with kids’s privateness legal guidelines, and we stay dedicated to investing within the instruments wanted to proceed being a pacesetter on this house.”

Axios was the primary to report the settlement.