Google and Meta's Secret Agreement to Circumvent Minor Regulations
TapTechNews August 9th news, according to the report of the Financial Times on the 8th, Google and Meta have reached a secret agreement aimed at placing Instagram ads on YouTube to teenagers, circumventing Google's own online behavior regulations for minors.
According to the documents obtained by the Financial Times and informed sources, Google designed a marketing project for Meta, with the goal of promoting its competitor's photo and video application Instagram to YouTube users aged 13 to 17.
Sources said that this Instagram advertising campaign deliberately targets the user group marked as 'unknown' in Google's advertising system, and Google knows that most of these users are minors. At the same time, the documents obtained by the Financial Times show that some steps were taken in the project to cover up the true intention of this advertising activity.
The project ignores Google's regulations on prohibiting personalized and targeted advertising to minors, including advertising based on demographic data. In addition, Google's policy also prohibits bypassing its own guidelines or evading the rules through 'agency targeting'.
These companies cooperated with the US subsidiary SparkFoundry of the French advertising giant Publicis Groupe and launched this pilot marketing plan in Canada from February to April this year.
Since the plan was considered to have achieved certain success, it was then tested in the US in May. According to informed sources, these companies originally planned to further expand its scope, including promoting other Meta applications such as Facebook and expanding to the international market.
TapTechNews learned from the report that after being contacted by the Financial Times, Google began to investigate these accusations. According to an informed source, the project has now been cancelled.
Google said: 'We prohibit personalized advertising to people under 18 years old, this is the bottom line. These policies go beyond legal requirements and are supported by technical safeguards. We have confirmed that these safeguards have worked properly here because we did not directly target known YouTube registered users under 18.'