The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has ordered Google-owned video sharing site YouTube to pay a $170 million fine for collecting children's personal data without their parents' consent and showing targeted ads using this data. Last July, the US Federal Trade Commission decided to impose a $5 billion fine on social networking site Facebook for the Cambridge Analytica scandal and other data breaches.

Unlike the penalty given to Facebook, the penalty in question was given due to the violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and went down in history as the highest penalty ever given under this law. However, officials state that this penalty is quite low and Google can continue to engage in such unlawful acts, given its $30.7 billion profit and $136.8 billion revenue in 2018.
Under the agreement with the US Trade Commission, YouTube will prevent targeted advertising to children by monitoring whether video content is intended for children.

After the penalty, Google published an article with the title "Changes to content for children on YouTube". Published article “We are making a few changes to the way we collect and use data from children's content on YouTube.com. These changes are intended to address concerns raised by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regarding our compliance with provisions under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). In the "Preparing for these changes" section of the article, it is stated that the changes will not be easy for creators, and it states that the affected creators are given a 4-month period to make adjustments by the US Trade Commission.