Google's reliance on self-reported age verification across its vast ecosystem (YouTube, Search, Maps) creates significant risk that minors' data is collected and used for profiling in ways that violate COPPA and equivalent laws, as demonstrated by the FTC's $170M YouTube settlement in 2019.
Google collects a wide range of personal data including location history, search queries, emails (for feature delivery), browsing activity on third-party sites via Google's ad network, voice and audio data, and device identifiers, combining these across all Google services to build detailed user profiles. This cross-service data combination powers Google's advertising business and means your activity on one Google product can influence what you see on entirely different products and third-party websites. You can review and delete your data, turn off ad personalization, and manage location history at myaccount.google.com/data-and-privacy.