[Fnoord]

My kid recently got a second hand iPad tablet. On it, she uses YouTube Kids. I made an account for her. Now, they ask _me_ for consent, since she cannot legally give it. They throw ads at her about toys, but this is illegal in my country to target children with ads. Ads are supposed to target parents, not kids. Now, if it were one ad at start, I'd hate it, but they go further: in a 10-minute movie, the thing quits like 3 times to show my kid an ad. She barely has the attention span to watch the bloody vid! You know why they do it? Not because it is legal; because they get away with it. Law is irrelevant if it isn't uphold.

[dghlsakjg]

You have the power to stop this: disable the app if you believe the ads are harming your child, or opt to pay for YT or another kids video service that doesn't serve ads.

One issue is that YT is possibly violating the law. A separate issue is that parents are allowing children to continue consuming harmful ad content on an app.

[crowcroft]

Not sure if YT for kids falls in this category exactly but the social nature of a lot of these products means that cutting your kid off also has negative effects in their social circle when all their friends are on the networks. That’s why collective action is needed, not just the action of individual parents.

[Ntrails]

If we all stand around and wait for the collective action to start, it never will. imo start by making informed choices and sharing your reasons when asked.

Shrugging at brainworms being inserted into your child and shrugging with a "well that's just the world we live in" is mind boggling to me. Heck, when i grew up there were kids without TV at home. They survived pretty well, despite a bit of social disconnect.

[littlecranky67]

I always hear this argument - is there any actual evidence that this is true though?

[pyuser583]

This is one of the worst parts. Social participation requires access to screens.

If you think having screens hurts kids mental health, wait until you take them away!

[Fnoord]

I have a pretty staunch policy for my kids. I don't mind paying for something if price us reasonable. Malware, nagware, adware however? No.

However there's two parents. So I draw a firm line at malware but allow adware. Especially also since grandma is OK with playing a F2P game with them helping them get past the ads. On the bright side: they certainly do learn to hate advertising. And dark patterns. Their little fingers are better at clucking the small X than mine!

Either way, I will figure out how to stop the nonsense without paying the mob my overly expensive contribution.

[type0]

You could use https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist

[crowcroft]

That’s the other thing as well, we need to spend more time upholding laws that already exist instead of getting distracted with these weird news publisher content regulations like Canada has.

[troyvit]

And Programmatic advertising makes this extremely difficult. Once you add a giant, automated ad exchange to advertising you've created opaque supply chains that help make it trivial to obfuscate who actually makes money from an ad. This article on ad fraud goes into more detail: https://xenoss.io/blog/programmatic-ad-fraud-detection

[crowcroft]

Agree on issues with programmatic. Compared to the number of dollars, and in particular number of dollars being spent on ads served to under 18s, programmatic is a rounding error compared to Google, Meta, TikTok etc.

https://www.emarketer.com/uploads/pdf/US_Ad_Spending_2023.pd...

[troyvit]

Whoah good point. Man for how small that market is they sure spend a lot of time screwing it up. Given their closed systems, do Google, Meta and TikTok have tighter controls over ads served to kids that they just aren't applying, or is it something else?

[crowcroft]

Over the years it’s hard to grok just how small ‘traditional’ media has become. Messing up programmatic and letting a ton of scam tech vendors take most of the money out of the system is a large part of that problem.

My experience is that the big vendors are better than scummy programmatic platforms in terms of ‘safety’ but even then not by much.

Even YouTube’s ‘for kids’ product consistently has scandals break out about it which says where the company’s priorities are.

[autoexec]

I don't know if apple will allow you to do it on an ipad, but even very young kids can learn to use something like newpipe or yt-dlp which can download videos and removes youtube's ads. If nothing else you could download ad-free videos and copy them to a device so there's a massive library of safe media you've vetted and wont have to worry about.

[Fnoord]

I use YouTube ReVanced and NewPipe on my own snartphones but I have not figured out of how block ads on the iPad (it does use DNS-based blocking via Unbound blocklists on OPNsense), she just got the iPad for a few days. On our smartphones, the children are the primary users of YouTube (on STB too, there we use SmartTube). Even YouTube Premium Family I had was primarily for my children. However they increased the subscription costs and went after people who set a different country than where they were located (I used India and paid 2 EUR a month). Now I am forced to pay the price if The Netherlands which is an illegal geolock since I should be allowed to define I am from elsewhere in EU (because I might be from Romania, living in The Netherlands).