Targeting hard-to-identify kids
When surfing the Internet, children are easy targets for digital marketing. Does European law provide enough protection for children? These are the questions posed in this interdisciplinary article written by a lawyer and a computer scientist. Juliette Sénéchal, professor of private law at the University of Lille, works in the Spirals project team at the Inria centre in Lille, while Oana Goga is a computer science researcher at the CNRS and part of the Cedar project team at the Inria Saclay centre.
“The European regulation on digital services, the so-called Digital Services Act, which came into force on 17 February 2024, prohibits the targeting of minors through profile-based advertising and the use of their personal data,” points out Juliette Sénéchal. Does this respect the privacy of young children? It's not that simple.“We found that advertising agencies can place ads on certain video content. This practice remains allowed because it is not targeting based on profiling. For example, if the video is a cartoon, children can be indirectly targeted,” replies Oana Goga.“This 'contextual' targeting is hard to spot because it's targeted to specific content. And that's exactly the problem…”
A roundabout way to target the very young generation
Taking it a step further, Oana Goga conducted an experiment. She posed as an advertising executive and tested a YouTube channel aimed at kids. She placed small (neutral) videos, like ads, on top of online videos. Kids watched these images before the video, without any moderation from the channel. This potential is certainly there, but are advertisers exploiting it?
To test this, the researchers created fake profiles to watch videos aimed at children and exposed them to real ads. Were these ads a coincidence or genuinely targeted at minors? “Search engines systematically add notes to ads to indicate targeting parameters. In this way, we were able to distinguish between ads targeted to videos and, conversely, ads targeted to the user's profile or location.” Results: The researchers found that this circumvention was actually known to a small number of advertisers targeting children.
Innovative and multidisciplinary insights
“With this article, we want to warn the European Union and raise its alarm about the possibility of targeting very young generations,” asserts Juliette Sénéchal. By combining the expertise of lawyers and computer scientists, they have been able to shed new legal and technical light on the current situation in which online advertising targets minors, despite the safeguards provided for in the Digital Services Act. This innovative and interdisciplinary approach earned them the Cnil-Inria runner-up prize.
Our article brought this little-known issue to the attention of the French data protection regulator, CNIL.“Our next challenge is to work with the European Union to ensure that any actions targeting children, whether based on profiling or video content, are prevented, limited or displayed.”
