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Apple Faces Class-Action Suit For In-App Purchases
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica:
"Garen Meguerian and a team of lawyers are taking Apple to task for 'inducing' children to spend hundreds of dollars of their parents' money on in-app game purchases. Meguerian filed a class-action lawsuit this week in California, acknowledging that Apple has already addressed the problem, but saying that the company continues to unfairly profit from sales of virtual 'smurfberries' and 'fish bucks.' The issue at hand is related to games that rely on a 'freemium' business model, giving away the game for free on the App Store and relying on in-app purchases of virtual currency, extra levels, or other add-ons as a revenue stream."
So, neglectful parents are suing Apple because they can't be fucked with to watch what their children are doing?
How about this: don't give your kid the iTunes account password?
... that parents are buying their children (who clearly aren't yet older enough to understand financial responsibility) expensive pieces of technology so that they don't actually have to parent or spend time with their children. IMO it's becoming far to common place for parents to sit their children in front of a TV or video game so that they don't have to keep them occupied. Who told them parenting wasn't hard work?
I'm not saying Apple hasn't been somewhat irresponsible for making it so easy to run up bills but a class action lawsuit is a little extreme for something that the parents are equally, if not more responsible for.
I can't really say Apple is doing anything wrong here. They have not only the option to disable said purchases available, they also went the extra step of modifying their password handling. Seems just like another case of stupid parenting to me.
OTOH I've had my kids' phones "virused" with pay-per-month crap... The invitation is sent as a text, and it's the typical "Hey check this out!" and all the kid has to do is reply. Bang! $10/month for ever for a monthly fortune. I don't know what stuff Apple was pulling, but certainly the texts my kids got were deceiving and not clear. And T-Mobile was complicit in allowing these operators to continue, no doubt getting a big slice of the action. I asked my daughter if she ever subscribed intentionally; she didn't even know she had subscribed. And T-Mobile admitted when I bitched about it that the come-on was often deceptive.
It was like the uproar over Beavis and Butthead many years ago. Even though parents were evidently responsible enough to get a tv, pay the electricity and the cable bill, they were not deemed responsible enough to monitor what the kids watched. Therefor MTV got in trouble when Beavis and Butthead tortured animals of set them afire. Evidently the kids would do the same and it was TV, not the parents fault.
So yes children are impressionable. Parents have to set limits on what kids are and are not able to do. But when parent make an explicitly decision to allow kids access to something, either by driving them there, or ordering a product, or giving access to a credit card, or whatever, it is no longer the companies fault. We saw this when kids were racking up huge phone and texting bills. I don't know what the issue was. If the kid can't use the phone, they don't get one, or have a prepaid.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
From the complaint: "The sale of an App and/or Game Currency is a transaction between Apple and the consumer. There is no privity between the user and the developer of the App...."
They're so right. Remember how Apple won't approve apps which do transactions that don't go through Apple? This is where that bites Apple. Apple is the seller, and the developers are its suppliers. There's no contractual relationship between the consumer and the developer. ("Privity" refers to the legal concept that if A has a contract with B, and B has a contract with C, A does not have a contract with C.)
Do people really plug in their credit cards into iTunes and then let there kids just do what they want with a device that has access to that resource? There is no way i would even leave a credit card attached to that kind of account, let alone let a child have unrestricted access that device. I have two iPod touches that my kids play with. At this point they are too young to grasp the concepts of accounts or passwords, but that day is coming. I only do iTunes cards so that there is no way that any financial damage can go beyond the amount i have already pre-paid (usually in the $15 to $25 range). A little common sense goes a long way in this world, but i guess that's asking too much.
Crisis is the rule, not the exception.
Would you like to buy a cookie for your pet?
o_o
It's a really good cookie!
O_o
With chocolate and stuff!
O_O
Your pet will wuv oo!
@_@
You bought a cookie!
It was nummy!
Your pet wuvs oo!
Buy another?
@_@
Yay! Your pet weally, weally wuvs oo!
[repeat n times]
Thanks for buying all the cookies for your very happy pet!
Charging $483.75 to account.
+_+
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This is one of those issues of parenthood.... My daughter sends some 7K per month. Of those, 2 in the last year were bad (resulting in extra charges). That to me is responsible use. (And lest people start yelling at me about her 'excessive' use, we don't have cable TV, she's on the honor roll and carries an A to A+ average in school, blah, blah, blah. She's not a slacker.)
So imposing draconian limits on her use is not the answer. The fault lies with deceptive and fraudulent marketing tactics. teaching her to be more careful, yes. Punishing, no.
OK, that's different from the crap T-Mobile was pulling....
My kids' iPods are hooked to their debit (cash) cards. So if they spend money, it's their own - and limited by the amount of cash they have. They spend wisely. (Amazing how frugal kids get when they're spending their own money.)
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2534
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
> I'm not sure that Apple should itself be held responsible for the slimy practices of third-party developers
They are a platform tyrant.
They have chosen to make themselves responsible.
Now that there are consequences, they should own up to them.
Now web games do the same sort of thing. Although it's more difficult to get carried away with it.
The iTunes approach to in-app purchases is kind of like a slot machine that takes credit cards.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
From Day 1, Apple has had parental controls that can disable the ability to make any App Store purchases on the device. And by default the phone would ask for the iTunes password whenever a new app was downloaded.
Well yes, you can completely disable app store purchases. However, they do not now, and never have considered $0 purchases any differently than $1000 purchases. Why not a graduated scale? Or allow $0 purchases without a password (after all, who cares about a $0 purchase?).
And the default of is not to ask for the password for every app purchase. They only ask once every 15 minutes. So you could get one app and not have to reauthenticate again if you immediately got another.
The problem initially is that in app purchases didn't require a password every time.
App purchases didn't "require" a password ever, as long as you had performed any authenticated iTunes login and purchase in the last 15 minutes. So if you don't let your children have the password, and you find a free game, like the Smurf one, download it and hand the phone to them, they have 15 minutes of in-app purchases without authentication. There was no way at all to turn off that functionality. What I'd do was to get the app then put it in airplane mode, start a countdown, and hand over the phone. No calls for 15 minutes, but no charges. When the alarm went off, I could take it out of airplane mode. From what I can tell, that's the easiest way to enforce on in-app purchases.
Apple has since corrected that.
They released a new OS that everyone would have to upgrade to. Because of their choice to never patch an OS, but instead to release new ones, this means that anyone with a 2G or 3G iPhone can never get the "fix." We have two iPhones, and they are the ones that can never get that OS. So it isn't fixed. I don't know the distribution of sales, but I'd guess that the number of iPhones sold which can't be "fixed" exceeds the number that can. And that's apparently ok with you.
Outside of that, Apple has done nothing.
They created a security model that considers the download of a $0 app to require the same security as $1000 of smurfberries, and that authorizing a single $0 app should authorize and infinite amount of other app and in-app purchases. That's a little sloppy. Once it's pointed out and it takes them years to fix it (spending most of that time doing what I see here and blaming parents for their inherently broken security) and then the fix doesn't work for many (most?) iPhones, it's no longer sloppy, it's negligent.
App developers are the ones putting in the in app purchases and promoting them in a way that children were getting to them. There may be some liability since Apple does have a curated app store, but it's going to be hard to prove intent that Apple was in any way doing this intentionally.
It's easy to prove they did it intentionally. How? It happened. People complained. Years passed... If they didn't do it intentionally, they continued the practice intentionally. The "best" fix is to allow users to disable in-app purchases of any kind. However, Apple doesn't want that because they make 30% of errors. They want people to make errors and then not demand refunds because the users feel silly asking for a refund for something they did and know they did, even if it was unintentional. Apple is profiting from these, and they were negligently slow in addressing the issue (and did so in a way that affected the least possible number of phones). And here you are lining up to blame the parents and exonerate Apple. I just don't see it.
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