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FTC Files Suit Against Amazon For In-App Purchases
Charliemopps writes The Federal Trade Commission has filed suit against Amazon for illegally billing parents for in-app purchases of digital goods prior to requiring a password for making purchases. "The FTC's complaint, filed Thursday, asks the court to force Amazon to refund the money to those customers. In-app purchases typically involve virtual goods bought within an app, like extra coins or energy in a game, according to the FTC. Some bills totaled hundreds of dollars, and some virtual goods cost as much as $99.99." We recently told you about Amazon's refusal to reach a settlement over these FTC complaints.
Here is the complaint in PDF
http://www.ftc.gov/system/file...
It says section 5(a) but I'm having trouble locating section 5.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/usc...
Anyone got any ideas where I'm doing it wrong?
They knew what they were doing, and they also know only a given percentage of those affected will ever seek damages.
If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
He only claimed that they paid no attention to user experience, not that they're shoddy at engineering things. The examples you provided actually demonstrate that point.
For instance, I read a few years back about how Bezos had then-recently hired designers to redo the website since its design seems like an over-crowded holdover from the '90s, before disregarding their ideas entirely because he couldn't bear to be without all of the stuff that's currently packed in. Likewise, their software for the Kindle Fire line can do some really neat stuff, but everything I've heard and seen indicates that it's sub-par from an experience perspective (e.g. unresponsive/laggy UI, inconsistent app designs/flows, disregard for common and obvious use cases). As for AWS and logistics, what of them? Logistics is entirely internal, while AWS isn't aimed at end users at all.
They can and do make cool stuff that's well-engineered, but there's a big difference between good engineering and good design. I, and I believe the OP, are accusing them of lacking the latter when it comes to their consumer-facing endeavors. Pretty much everything about Amazon feels like a cheap commodity, which is fine when I want cheap cables from their Amazon Basics line that I'll plug in once and never touch again, but isn't so good when it's something I'm interacting with on a daily basis, such as their site.
they're not real and have no constitutional authority
You're not real and have no constitutional authority!
Now now children, there's enough constitutional authority out there for everyone. :D
It's also time they address the infamous one-click buying button, which is basically the same thing.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
The companies (and I do hate Amazon and pretty much all the other monopolies in this country) should also use common sense knowing you have idiots that lack any sense to better protect your company.
If you think it differently, you would see that common sense is not equal to profit. Big corporations (or any of those who are out to make more money) do try any business practice and hope they can get away with. In this case, they have a certain level of expectation on parents' to be able to foresee what their kids are going to do. They try to push the responsibility on parents and exploit the loop hole in order to get away with their business practice. So why do they care for common sense that many parents are idiot or short sighted?
Also, let me ask you this. How many big business out there that really care and apply common sense of their customers to their practice? They may start off with caring for their customers. Once their customers are locked in, at one point they all make their own rules and expect customers to follow. Now it becomes "take it or leave it." How many customers actually leave even though they make a complaint? This happens not only in the U.S. but everywhere else in the world. It is the business common sense to exploit other humans...
No one is going to argue that parents shouldn't be watching what their children do. However if the system is set up that you can spend $100 in 2 clicks in Playskool-like game without entering the account password, something is wrong. The whole point of the suit is that apps could buy from the app store from inside the application without entering the password or having any sort of Parental Control. Amazon knew that this was a problem and profited off of it. And you are calling the parents greedy...
No one has problems with the micro-transactions themselves. But for them to be made without having to type the account password. So when you die in an app a dialog might pop up saying click ok to get another life and the parents account gets magically charged $10. No one really cares if the person charges that much for a life, but that there is a proper warning and approval. Free to play will be just fine, unethical apps that try to scam small children hopefully won't.