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Federal Court Allows Class-Action Suit Against Apple Over In-App Purchases
suraj.sun writes "An iPhone-owner whose daughter downloaded $200 worth of 'Zombie Toxin' and 'Gems' through in-app purchases on his iPhone has been allowed to pursue a class action suit against Apple for compensation of up to $5m. Garen Meguerian of Pennsylvania launched the class-action case against Apple in April 2011 after he discovered that his nine-year-old daughter had been draining his credit card account through in-app purchases on 'free' games including Zombie Cafe and Treasure Story. This month, Judge Edward J Davila in San Jose District Federal Court has allowed the case to go to trial, rejecting Apple's claim that the case should be dismissed. Meguerian claimed that Apple was unfairly targeting children by allowing games geared at kids to push them to make purchases. He describes games that are free to play but require purchases of virtual goods to progress as 'bait apps' and says they should not be aimed at children."
You do realize that you have at least 1-2 years in which to file a suit after you've been injured, so that filing a class action after you discover that you and a bunch of other people were injured is not extortion, but rational and appropriate. Its also far easier to justify a hiring a lawyer to pursue a case where a large number of people have been harmed then to either hire a lawyer to pursue a case worth only $200, or learn how to navigate small claims court on your own.
Also, define "quickly" and "effectively" -- these sorts of games pretty much existed in the app store from the get-go, and IOS 4.3 was released in March 2011. The iPad was released in April 2010, which ignores all the phones that came before it. Shall we google for the first complaints from iPhone users, or is 11 months sufficiently beyond "quickly" for you?
Screw you. I've bought an iPad for a four year old. Four year olds barely understand the concept of "money," much less what an in app purchase is. Fortunately it was an iPad 2, I'd read about the issue, and I configured the thing to always require a password (as well as to disable in app purchases, although frankly that just makes the times that you want to make them far more painful -- 1 password vs. exit, settings, restrictions, pin, switch, double-home, app, password).
You want to reward Apple (gatekeeper/reviewer of all, for a healthy 30%) and software developers like Zynga by freeing them from any responsibility to learn their own lesson and modify their own "get rich quick schemes." The parent and child deserve at least some blame, but the experts (i.e., Apple and developers) were being predatory and quite blameworthy. Is Apple's defense at trial going to be "we couldn't possibly foresee this issue since none of us have children"? Apple is all about the user experience, but does anyone other than an idiot, an addict, or a child buy a $99 consumable immediately after buying a "free" game? I'd love to see a demographic study of what goes on here.
It's irrelevant how much of a technical genius and/or disciplinarian you may be -- the law protects consumers who are average citizens from unconscionable acts, such as where a seller takes advantage of consumers "lack of knowledge, ability, experience, or capacity to a grossly unfair degree." (Use your mad skills to Google the phrase)
First time iPhone/iPad buyers are not going to have the knowledge or experience to know that their purchase password not only is cached to allow other app store purchases, but cached to allow in app purchases as well. First time iPhone/iPad buyers are not going to that there is an option to turn in-app purchases off. You buy an app for your kid, you hand the iPad to the kid to play the app once it's installed. Not 15 minutes later. You buy a free app, you don't expect progress in the app to essentially require you to buy "a basket of coins" for $99.
If people were such geniuses, then the default configuration would be require passwords to be entered immediately, and possibly to delve into the settings to enable in-app purchases. That's the more secure and fail safe configuration, after all. Why is that not the default? Because your average person is not a genius, does not have time to read a user manual, and learns by use and experiance. If they become annoyed, they might look for setting to chang