Sony Music  has become 1 million dollars poorer. That is how things came out after the company’s brush with the Federal Trade Commission’s justice. The FTC had accused Sony BMG Music Entertainment (a subsidiary of Sony Corp. of America) of violating privacy protection rights of children under the age of 13. $1 million is probably the largest sum a company has had to pay as a penalty imposed by the FTC.

We’re talking about something called the COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Basically, Sony went astray of its norms by collecting and disclosing personal information about children under 13 who accessed the company’s sites. Here’s how FTC puts it, according to RTT News: “Sony Music requires users to submit a broad range of personal information, together with date of birth, in order to register for these sites. On 196 of these sites, Sony Music knowingly collected personal information from at least 30,000 underage children without first obtaining their parents' consent, in violation of COPPA.”

In layman’s terms, the danger to which Sony Music subjected these children comes from the fact that many of their sites are also social semi-networks based around various musical artists, where users can share photos, videos and things like that. And the FTC says that, this way, the children could come into contact with adults without their permits knowing about it or allowing it.  

Even more, according to the Federal Trade Commission, it seems that Sony Music’s privacy policy mentioned that users who register as being under 13 will not have access to the sites’ activities. “In fact, Sony Music accepted registrations from children who entered a date of birth indicating that they were under 13,” says the commission.