Disney to pay $10 million FTC settlement over children's data


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

Mario Tama | Getty Photographs

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

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

The grievance alleged that Disney violated the Youngsters’s On-line Privateness Safety Rule by not labeling some YouTube movies as being made for youngsters. The company claimed the corporate was capable of acquire information from viewers of child-directed content material who had been below 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 listing whether or not uploaded movies had been “made for teenagers” or “not made for teenagers.” The designation ensures that non-public info is just not collected from the “made for teenagers” movies and personalised adverts is not going to 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 kids’s information safety rule and implement a program to evaluate whether or not movies posted to YouTube must be designated as “made for teenagers.”

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

Axios was the primary to report the settlement.