Tech Update– According to the Financial Times, Meta and Google collaborated to run an undercover operation that purposefully targeted 13 to 17 year-olds with Instagram ads on YouTube, violating the search engine giant’s policies prohibiting advertising to minors.
According to the journal, Google tried to hide the fact that the group was biased toward minors by targeting ads to a portion of users classified as “unknown” in its advertising systems. The “unknown” demographic category, according to a Google Ads support page, is made up of individuals whose age, gender, parental status, or household income are allegedly unknown. When chosen, it enables advertisers to access “a significantly wider audience.”
However, the FT reports that Google could use app downloads and online activity to determine “with a high degree of confidence” that younger users populated the “unknown” group. Google employees are alleged to have used this legal loophole to circumvent the company’s own regulations, which were implemented in 2021 and prohibit ad targeting based on “age, gender, or interests of people under 18.”
Meta and Google planned to launch the campaign globally and advertise other services like Facebook. The project started as Google’s advertising revenue dropped and Meta’s younger customers switched to competitors like TikTok.
Since then, Google has begun investigating the claims, and the campaign has been cancelled. “We prohibit ads being personalised to people under 18, period,” Google said in a statement to the publication. We’ll also be taking additional action to reinforce with sales representatives that they must not help advertisers or agencies run campaigns attempting to work around our policies.”
As per recent update, Google has moved to court against an antitrust lawsuit in the US that alleged Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg were involved in a secret ad collusion plot.
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