Credit: Damien Wilde / Android Authority
- A group within Google and Meta worked together to run a secret ad campaign targeting 13 to 17-year-olds on YouTube.
- The group found a way to skirt Google’s own rules against targeting teenagers.
- Google has ended the campaign and is now conducting an investigation into the matter.
Personalizing digital ads targeting children has long been a controversial business practice. To that point, Google introduced rules back in 2021 prohibiting targeting ads towards anyone under the age of 18. A new report, however, says that a rogue group of Google employees worked together with Meta employees to break the company’s own rules.
Google has a demographic of users in its ad program that it labels as “unknown.” Based on firm’s help page, this unknown category includes “people whose age, gender, parental status or household income we haven’t identified.” According to the Financial Times, some Google and Meta staff were using the category to funnel Instagram ads on YouTube that skewed toward teens.