Slashdot Mirror
UK Gov To Investigate 'Aggressive' In-app Purchases
hypnosec writes "The UK Government will be examining whether free to download apps are putting unfair pressure on kids to pay up for additional content within the game through in-app purchases. Office of Fair Trading (OFT), UK, will be carrying out the investigation of games that include 'commercially aggressive' in-app purchases after a number of cases have been reported whereby parents have incurred huge bills after their kids have spent huge amounts on in-app purchases."
You mean like a game that lets you make steady progress for a few hours, then suddenly ups the difficulty level to a point where the only way to continue is to pay for something? Few adults can resist, how many kids would be able to?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
This is myopic, and I bet you are not a parent. In fact I bet you're probably still a kid, with that attitude.
It is not a new trend that companies make it easy to spend huge amounts of money before a parent knows what's going on. Buying a kid a toy used to be a safe bet, the purchase of the item was the sum total of the toy's price. Nowadays, every device has a built in app-store or similar functionality and a credit card is required to even make the device function (why does Apple require a credit card to download free apps or update apps that you've already paid for?!).
Expecting parents to be looking over the shoulder of their kids, who are still too young to have developed the ability to fully comprehend the consequences of spending 50c every few minutes over the span of a month, is unreasonable, and companies that engage in predatory sales in this manner should not be given a free pass on the back of the "well parents should be looking after their kids" argument.
I owned and ran a cell phone shop for 10 years, and one of the most frequent complaints was parents giving a "safety phone" to their kids at age 15 only to rack up huge bills on premium ringtone services. Sure, those kids should probably have been on prepaid, but that does not clear the companies charging $5 per ringtone, and then auto subscribing the number to a $5/day new ringtone service of responsibility. Yes, this happened, just like I'm describing it.
Companies feeding on the impulsiveness of children should be strung up and flogged. So should Apple, for making it a requirement that a credit card be entered into the phone at all times.
I hate printers.
... the gaming industry has turned into a crime syndicate over the last 6-7 years. It's been discusting with the rise of F2P and charging for virtual items in MMO's with both WoW and diablo 3 being among the biggest offenders.
Reality is we need to crack down on software you can never own and can be "turned off" whenever a company says so. So many older apps/games functionality is fubar because of current anti-customer industry practices. The bad thing is kids and stupid adults feed these companies money year after year.
Except it is not 50c every few minutes. In some cases it is £69.99 ($99.99 at Apple exchange rates) every few minutes.
My 5 year old son taught me a very important lesson about having a PIN on your payment methods...
Luckily it only cost me £25 ($40).
Not being a great reader my son just clicks OK to all the boxes that pop up, so there is great opportunity for game manufacturers to dupe unsuspecting parents into spending lots of their cash.
It is a one time only scam though which I really should have thought through but I, along with thousands of other hapless parents, have inadvertently contributed to Zepto Labs' coffers.
Education for parents is the solution IMHO. I got mine the hard way ;-)
Every man for himself, all in favour say "I"
I can't believe that more parents don't set up a limited balance bank card so that their kids can learn about budgeting etc.
Such accounts are very, very rare. Even the most basic debit card account at my local bank has an implicit overdraft 'just in case' I 'overspend'.
I'd hazard a guess there are a fair few parents out there that don't quite understand apps, smart phones and the like. But in the case of UK law, I'd also imagine that there are instances where apps are misleading people to think play is free, but it isn't. If this is the case then they could be falling foul if UK law - a bit like calling something a beef burger when it is actually 75% Winnie-the-Pooh.
There's a lot of nasty software out there that is specifically targeted at kids and charges huge amounts for ingame items. My kids are at a young age and they simply do not understand the difference between real cash and virtual ingame cash, to them it's all the same. So if an app says 'do you want to buy this for 99,99 euros', they just tap 'yes'.
What I don't understand is why a parent would give an iPad/Nexus/whatever with a fully accessible master account to a child. On my iPad I just disabled in-app purchases and set password to 'every time' instead of 'once every 15 minutes'. And no app buying or removing either.
I don't have kids, and I don't have an iPad either. However I do have friends who are, to be blunt, technically naive. It might surprise the Slashdot crowd, but one friend actually went on a work course where they were taught such things as the difference between files and folders! (To be fair the same friend is trying to get more computer literate - she has bought herself "Windows for Dummies" and is studiously working through it. I think she's actually thought of as something of a geek at where she works; she's a qualified midwife and works in a hospital unit for premature babies, so she's not in anyway 'stupid', just not computer literate).
Anyway, the point is that many would not understand the technology or technological trends in a way that we would on Slashdot. To many a game is a game, whether physical (a board game or card game or some such) or virtual (Solitaire anyone?) Games in the past do not allow you to 'buy extras' mid game, so this behaviour is unexpected. From past experience allowing your child (or mother) to play a game on a computer or iPad would be considered safe - the possibility of actual money being spent would not be considered and therefore not dealt with. To be honest, not being an iPad owner nor a computer game player, I would not be aware of this 'feature' in games - after all I've never seen it in Solitaire!
So let's not blame the parents. Let's instead blame those taking advantage of the possibilities of new technology and of the naivete of actual users. It is this that's behind the investigated by the OFT.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
As much as I despise the practice of these predatory in-app systems, I have to chime in that iTunes does not require a credit card at all. You can create an account with just a $10 gift card. Apple has never had and will never get my creditcard information.
That group of bovine standing over there appears quite portentous. That's right it's an ominous cow herd.
/shrug
You can look on it as government interference if you want, but in the UK people like the OFT: we look on their work as consumer protection.
The key word is 'Fair'. If a trade practice is 'unfair', the OFT are pretty effective at stopping it. If it really is just a case of your kid spending your money, then no, it's not the government's problem. But how will the OFT know if it's fair if they don't investigate?
I don't have any children, so I've no axe to grind, but I still think it's a good idea that they at least investigate the fairness of in-app purchases.
The OFT is one of the reasons that in the UK they have a variety of mobile phone providers with coverage everywhere, that they can move between with no penalty, and who will unlock our phones on demand. I don't think this is true of the US.
Nowadays, every device has a built in app-store or similar functionality and a credit card is required to even make the device function (why does Apple require a credit card to download free apps or update apps that you've already paid for?!).
That's simply not true.
http://s.iosfans.com/?u=http://cdn.macorg.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/free-apple-account-002.png
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2534
Plus, if you do have a credit card set up, then purchases require the password to be entered. You didn't give a password connected to your credit card to your kid did you?
On top of that, there are parental controls (under a different password) on the iOS devices, including one that turns off in-app purchase,
Further more, gift cards are available if you want to allocate a set amount for a child to spend.
So exactly how difficult is it for a responsible parent to stop their child spending? Actually it's the opposite way around... the parent has to take steps to enable the kid to make purchases.
For sure though there are a lot of parents that don't have the intelligence to not give a child a credit-card enabled phone. And low intelligence is not their fault. And I have no problem at all with governments clipping the wings of any companies peddling exploitative apps or premium phone lines.
This isn't about kids spending money. It's about deceitful advertisements that trick people in buying stuff.
The average person might see through these tricks. But a huge population is dumber than the average person.
Part of the difficulty with teaching children how to manage money is the abstraction of value, worth and effort. Adding a additional layer of plastic over the problem will only make it worse. Giving an allowance of real money that they can visually watch diminish as they spend it is a better way for them to learn.
That group of bovine standing over there appears quite portentous. That's right it's an ominous cow herd.
Bingo. Since the late 80s firms have routinely been slapped down for predatory practices when it comes to kids. TV is the most obvious example - toy commercials have been forcibly unbundled from their parent programs and standards have been imposed to prevent the Chocobot Hour problem - but regulations have been put in place elsewhere for similar reasons. The US already has COPPA for dealing with the Internet, which prevents firms from collecting information on children under 13, for largely the same reasons.
Anyhow, not to go on an anti-corporate rant here, but this isn't anything new. Kids are stupid/naive and easily influenced, and less scrupulous businesses have long attempted to do an end-run around parents by targeting kids directly, which is why these regulations are in place. Parents should absolutely keep a close eye on what their kids are doing and nothing the government can do will replace that, but parents are ultimately competing against firms employing graduate level psychological methods. Kids are all but helpless here, so it's not a fair fight to say the least.
Parents should not have to fight against firms blatantly predating on their kids, which is what some of these kid-focused games are trying to do.
Usually, I'm the first to cry "no way" if government thinks it needs to butt in with the thinkofthechildren card. But they do have a point here. Game companies are tying to use the naivety and gullibility of kids to squeeze money out of them. And short of 24/7 monitoring, there is little parents can do. More and more games require you to enter a CC number "just in case", so you can play at all. And let's be honest, you can tell your kids 10 times that they must not spend real money, often it's easy to overlook whether you're spending in game or real money on your purchase. It's deliberately done so it's hard for the user to notice, and twice so for kids who don't really have a working concept of the value of money. For a 5 year old, 1, 10 and 100 bucks are just numbers, they don't really know how much is "much" and what is still "little". Not to mention that many little things add up, and kids have even less a concept for that.
What I would still prefer to a regulation would be some kind of "child friendly environment" ad sticker that gets promoted and that gets handed to games that don't try to rip off kids, as a guideline for parents which games are suitable for their children. Such games would, e.g. offer online purchases only for vouchers instead of CCs for kids under 14, would allow parents a separate login to monitor their kids' spending habits, would constantly show how much money has been spent this month already and would allow parents to set limits to how much their kids may spend per week or month. I could well see something like a "seal of approval" by some child protection group that such games could use to advertise their games, what government should do is either form such a group or endorse a reputable one and advertise that "seal" as a way for parents to discriminate between good and bad games.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The real problem is after hundreds of years of trying to make a civilized world/society where you don't have to keep watching for predators all the time, you still get assholes who ruin things for everyone.
Not saying we should turn the world into a safe theme park but these people know exactly what they are doing - preying on the weak. Some may say who cares about the weak, but us humans have got where we are not by being the strongest badass creature in the world. Or even the smartest. Yes we're smart but it's not what makes a country great. We've got where we are by working together and not backstabbing each other at every opportunity.
A country full of smart people backstabbing each other doesn't get very far. A lot of those nice places to live in are nice because they're not full of swindlers, thieves and backstabbers. And so making life harder for such people is not something I'd lose sleep over. Give them half a chance and they might "progress" to investment banking...
No, the solution is another provider who don't force a credit card. Such as android - no card needed!
Or you can go to the apple store and try to buy an iphone/ipad with cash. Claim that you don't have a credit card, ask them to set up the device for you. Maybe they can? If they tell you to get a card "no risk because you don't have to use it, tell the clerk to ready the device using his own card. No risk because there will be no use, right?
I agree that some of these games could be excessive if you purchased all the in-game items. I calculated that purchasing each "premium" item at least once could cost between $100 and $500 for Simpsons: Tapped Out. This is very similar to gambling. You can have sensible people that view it as some entertainment and will stop after a limit, or you have the people that don't set limits and lose a lot. With that comparison, kids are protected from gambling so there should be something in place for software companies to protect children. Software companies do need to make money of course, and this method is important because it allows the consumer to try a game before buying/paying for it. It also allows people that don't want to grind to be able to experience the end-game content. I do object to games like Simpsons: Tapped Out that make it next to impossible to ever get premium items without paying, but that's their choice. On the flip side, some responsible parenting would be good too. Teach children the value of money and of working for a reward (in-game or otherwise). Don't give your children access to phones or software that are attached to credit cards or billing accounts. Restrict them to game/gift cards for purchasing content. (perhaps that could be the new currency for allowances?)
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
This is the same problem 99% of security experts seem to not understand: If you require passwords for everything that dilutes the security for when it's really needed.
If the parents only had to type the password when they spend real money, they would realize that they need to keep it safe. Heck, the amount of times iOS bugged me about my password I wouldn't be surprised if some parents just said "screw it, the password's hunter2. Don't buy anything though". Just to stop their kids from bugging them every 5 minutes.