Slashdot Mirror
Critics To FTC: Why Do You Hate In-App Purchasing Freedom?
jfruh writes The FTC has moved aggressively recently against companies that make it too easy for people — especially kids — to rack up huge charges on purchases within apps. But at a dicussion panel sponsored by free-market think tank TechFreedom, critics pushed back. Joshua Wright, an FTC commissioner who dissented in a recent settlement with Apple, says a 15-minute open purchase window produced "obvious and intuitive consumer benefits" and that the FTC "simply substituted its own judgment for a private firm's decision as to how to design a product to satisfy as many users as possible."
Because its their job to hate people who take advantage of others in matters of trade?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Joshua Wright, an FTC commissioner who dissented in a recent settlement with Apple, says a 15-minute open purchase window produced "obvious and intuitive consumer benefits" and that the FTC "simply substituted its own judgment for a private firm's decision as to how to design a product to satisfy as many shareholdersas possible."
FTFY
Silence is a state of mime.
If a 15 minute open refund period produced "obvious and intuitive consumer benefits" just think about what an hour could do. You know, like enough to actually test out the app for REAL. Especially apps that are more complicated than flappy bird and, oh yeah, more expensive.
Mea Culpa: though I will acknowledge that a "free" app with in-app purchase, that works well enough to test it out before spending money, is indeed one way to get around the limited 15 minutes to test the app.
But of course those apps are not the problem. The problem the government (you know, the supposedly by the people FOR the people) is trying to prevent predatory sharks from bilking people of money through shady practices like kids games that make it very easy to just click click spend a shed load of money.
If you can't be good, be good at it!
... labeling all games with IAPs as rentals and displaying the average cost of being able to keep playing... per hour or something like that?
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
Sadly, America's just getting on the end of the demographic tidal wave which will make this impossible, so the golden years where everything is perfect are going to seem really short.
True unless, ironically, the nation can still grow its' population base ahead of the European models... most likely through imigration.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
In the 21st century, people are screaming for the government to regulate their lives in order to protect them, to provide "security", and to "make people feel safe". It's the fag end of the smoldering socialist experiment.
It has nothing to do with socialism. There are a lot of self-described conservatives in favor of restrictive and intrusive regulation in the name of security.
As the arcades closed I thought that never again people would accept coin-op's. :)
But the Smurfberries in all their incarnations and the DLC's on PC clearly shows I was wrong.
You go to a theme-park with your children.
If the kids want to have an ice-cream, they just go to the ice-cream stand, order and say the name of their parents (you), so they get the bill when you leave.
Who thinks this is not a brilliant idea?
(Sorry for not posting a car-analogy)
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Aside from protecting users it deters games from being glorified skinner boxes with cow-clicker complexity and micropayments galore and encourages producers to start making actual games again.
When companies take advantage of customer addiction tendencies, it's predatory, and causes long-term suffering, for short-term satisfaction.
Since the companies can't regulate themselves, the government must do it for them.
Coke is without coke these days as well, and that is a good thing (coke causes the brain to become psychopathic over time).
Socialism is democratic worker control of the means of production, you troglodyte. That's all it is. There is less security under socialism than capitalism, because nobody is allowed to rely on invested capital. This minor controversy has absolutely nothing to do with socialism.
All that's going on here is a few rich guys whining that they want ways of taking money from people using a technological loophole - the ease with which a child can use mom's credit card - rather than directly as a result of a contract formed between two adults providing informed consent. If anything, the capitalist position would run contrary to TechFreedom's argument because capitalism strives for informed, rational agents, necessarily treating children as a special case. To be clear, children usually cannot form contracts, but nobody owns children, therefore they cannot be entirely responsible for their actions.This reflects their status as developing humans.
So get off your high horse and stop worrying that the sky is falling. Every dull member of every new generation speaks like the "golden days" have come to an end because xyz minor thing that they don't really understand means the end of the world.
Sure, hey, why not? Not sure where to put that apostrophe, slap it on at the end!!
Why is this phrased from the extreme viewpoint of one of the sides in the issue? The phrase "Why Do You Hate In-App Purchasing Freedom?" could be rewritten "Why Do You Hate Me Exercising My Freedom To Steal Your Kid's Cellphone By Trading It For a Cheap Toy He Wants?"
I'm sorry. The issue concerns In App Purchases that are engineered to allow gullible kids to rack up charges on their parent's phone.
It seemed safer than leaving it out, what with the growing strength of the punctuation lobby.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
What do you mean by "brand of socialist"? Are you trying to re-define "socialist" as a pejorative rather than a label for a specific system? "Anything which doesn't agree with a particular sort of free market system," perhaps? I understand that "socialist" is sometimes used in the United States like "terrorist" - the latter is a person who inflicts terror on civilians to achieve a political aim, but is commonly re-"branded" to mean "anyone I'm fighting against".
I am not judging socialism - I am merely telling you how its "founding fathers", supporting Parties and every political text identify it. Whether it succeeds is another matter. OK, we could listen to how hypocritical dictator Stalin defines communism, and we could also listen to how he defines capitalism... what is your point? Tell me what you're for. IOW, tell me what you references you accept in your understanding of the definition of "socialism". And, to be transparent, I'm not asking about whether it works, but testing your intellectual integrity.
"Disable In App Purchases" should be a checkbox in the settings for the App Market and it should simply render invisible any games that incorporate In App Purchases
It would also render invisible any games that use your suggested shareware model. There are two distinct kings of IAP: "entitlements", which are purchased once and stay with the user as long as the use continues to use the platform, and "consumables", whose purchase can be repeated. Purchases of paid apps are essentially an entitlement inside the App Store app, and registering shareware is the same as buying mission packs, which are entitlements. Most of the IAP ire comes from consumables like "smurfberries". What you appear to want is a way to hide apps that use consumable IAP while keeping those that use entitlements.
What would it display for "price per hour" in the case of games that ship with one episode and use a one-time in-app purchase to "register" the game and unlock the entire rest of the campaign? Historical examples include Doom, which had "Knee-Deep in the Dead" without charge and two mission packs called "Ultimate Doom" and "Doom II".
Socialism isn't a system, it's a class of systems. It encompasses everything from social democratic state on Scandinavia to Marxist-Leninist states.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What the fuck are these so-called "benefits" of a "15 minute open purchase window" that are so obvious and intuitive?
Forget about "the children". Who is so badly damaged as a person that they feel that it's currently just too hard to buy stuff online?
You know, I'm starting to think those kooks over at Adbusters might be on to something. We are one fucked-up society, and it looks like the marketing/industrial complex is in large part to blame.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Meanwhile the park employees are all atwitter about StripedCow's 300 children.
But once management finds out about their tweets, watch them end up fired for spilling the beans, like Nicole Crowther in this BI article, in favor of people who can keep their mouth shut. Then watch management find people like twitter, who can do the job of a dozen people.
and often weren't bad value for the money. You got to play games on far more advanced hardware than you could afford at the time and the operators maintained a public space you could play others in.
:P, go figure.
DLC's & free to play are the same. You can do them right and wrong. I've generally heard good things about Warframe and League of Legends. On the other end of the spectrum you've got Dungeon Keeper and Candy Crush Saga. And right in the middle you've got stuff like Mechwarrior tactics.
Heck, if you want a real world example look at the stuff Games Workshop is doing recently where Expensive high value models that used to belong in specific rule expansions have been introduced into the main game to sell more of them. I expected a backlash but instead the fans were happy they could justify the purchase of a $300 model kit with the knowledge they could use it in game
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Social democracy is a nod in the direction of socialism, and it may have institutions which operate partly according to socialist principles, but it is certainly not socialism. It's not just that the majority of work is conducted through private enterprise, but that state ownership of the commanding heights of the economy tends to be selective, and their organisation tends not to focus on democratic control: a government may merely have a controlling share in a business run as any other capitalist business.
Indeed, capitalism itself is an accommodating system which allows individual organisations to operate according to socialist principles, but this doesn't mean that capitalism is one of the set of socialist systems.
If you want to use the terminology of computer science, socialism may be a "superclass" in that there are various different ways of instantiating a socialist regime, but it is certainly not a "class of systems" in the sense of a spectrum of real-world regimes from centre left to far left.
Marxism-Leninism as it was written about is socialist, yeah. As it was implemented, well, it's as safe to call the US a "free market"!
Just because somebody messes up grammar doesn't give you the right to be an asshole about it. Bullies are bullies even if their aims are admirable from some angle.
pretty sure you mean wank tank
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Or, people could start using their brain and actually learn how to use their devices that they feel that HAVE to have. As long as the option is there to ask every time, it's in the user's court. I'm tired of everyone being too dumb to even try.
It would enable games with a 'trail' shareware version, and a 'paid' full version.
If the trial version and the full version are separate apps, then how would the player move saved progress from the trial version to the full version? Or would the player be forced to restart the campaign?
Why would anyone give their credit card info to some random app?
They don't. "In-App purchases" are charged to your Apple Store/ Google Play/Amazon/whatever account. There are APIs to enable this.
You usually have to give your password for this to happen... but there are various gotchas such as a 15-minute window during which you don't have to re-enter your password and other design flaws e.g. asking for your password even for free apps.
So, scenario: Little Johnny asks Daddy to enter password to install free, or maybe 50c game. Daddy checks that game is, indeed $0.50 and enters password, 10 minutes later, Daddy has left the room and little Johnny is asked if he wants to buy 1000 magic berries for $10... and doesn't need a password.
Then, you've got games which mix in-app purchases with real money and an in-app imaginary currency just for good measure...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
This is a good example of why when there are no consequences, civil behavior deteriorates.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You clearly don't understand the meaning of EITHER socialism or communism. Communism predates Karl Marx. And Stalinism isn't even Marx-Lenninism. (Note the hyphenated designation, as that which Lenin preached and practiced wasn't what Marx preached.) Also neither is Maoism, which also is only one variety of communism. (Stalinism isn't ANY kind of communism. It's just standard totalitarian dictatorship with an unusually brutal and despotic dictator. Only Idi Amin could claim to practice the same kind of government, though Pot Pol had certain similarities.)
Calling yourself something doesn't mean that the label rightfully applies to you. The North Korean government calls itself a "People's Republic", but it doesn't match the conventional meaning of Republic. (Do note, however, that Republics are normally controlled by an Oligarchy of some sort. It's not the "feel good" term that USians are generally taught it is. Not if you really understand what it means and how it operates. And the constitution guarantees that the states will have a Republican [Things of the Public] form of government, not a Demmocratic [i.e., power derives from the people] kind of government. And in both these cases I grossly simplified the meanings of the terms. In fact I'd need to research a bit to determine precisely what each meant, though basically in a Republic power derives from ownership of things, and in a Democracy power derives from being a "person", for some meaning of person. [E.g., slaves were originally considered to be only 2/3 of a person in the US.] Please note that this doesn't mean that the power belongs to the people, but rather that the government allocates power on the basis of people.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Or they could use WiFi for that like sensible people. They could even download an upgrade from the app store, a tiny app that just sets the appropriate flags and goes away.
I have a feeling the only person here that is confused is you.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Sorry, but you are confusing existing systems which are called Socialist with Socialism. It's not an unreasonable argument, but Socialism isn't necessarily a government. Local laws permitting individual factories can be Socialist. And there is no guarantee that such a facotry would provide those benefits.
OTOH, both countries and factories can fail whether they are Socialist or Capitalist. There's no inherent guarantee that one is more likely to fail than the other. The fact that there are few successful Socialist factories reflects their low rate of formation, and their high infant mortality (because they often come into existence only when the original, run on a Capitalist basis, is going bankrupt...so it is sold to the workers).
I don't find much validity in the GP's argument, but neither do I in yours. Public health measures are not an inherently socialist feature, even though they are more common and extensive in governments called Socialist. They should sensibly be considered as "investment to maintain the health of the social body upon which the government subsists". That they are considered socialist is due largely to the work of the American Medical Association, which had a vested interest in not having the government control their wages and prices. Now that those things are instead controlled by the insurance industry that vested interest has evaporated, but the prejudices instilled have not...and the insurance companies are quite happy to keep those prejudices going.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
As the originator of the term, he had the right to define it. But the definition that he created was based not only on his words, but also on his actions.
Under the control of Mussolini the government tried to use minimal force to get its way (i.e., to satisfy the business interests), but if minimal force wouldn't work, he was quite willing to use more.
N.B.: He also created the term "egghead" to describe intellectuals, because his thugs found it so easy to break their heads.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It seemed safer than leaving it out,
The rules are very simple, and as a foreigner this is how I remember a a lot of these things:
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/a...
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Companies are probably breaking all kinds of laws when they sell things to an 11 year old without parental consent. So who needs the protection? How about dad discovering that his 16 year old has racked up $1,500 in one month on cam girls? One answer to many problems is a strong, national ID card. A simple computer check could contact the card holder anywhere at any time in such a way a wayward child would be detected right away.
I thought iOS isolated apps from one another, not letting apps "set flags" in other apps. It's not like Android, which has more general forms of inter-application communication like the ContentProvider.
I suspect states will have to form their own regulations because the federal government is fucked up by infighting and extremists.
Some may feel letting states deal with it is a good thing, but it would also mean that app makers have to consider the rules of many different states.
Table-ized A.I.
And this should affect regulations... why?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
It would make to so much easier for so many people if you could allow them to make purchases by simply looking at the buy button. It's one step past one-click!
What about debiting the listeners credit card $1.99 for the full music track if they don't click stop within 30 seconds of a preview?
It would benefit so many consumers.
My phone shows that I have used ~1.95GB of cellular data since July 7th. You can be sure that I am not going to be paying anywhere near $1,950 for this month's phone bill. If you are paying $1 per MB, you have been conned.
Egg is on my face. I meant 1 cent, not 1 dollar.
Read here, the section Share Data Among Apps.
Because consumer laziness isn't (shouldn't be) enough of a reason for the government to spend time and money on the issue.
So the corporations were controlling Hitler? Go read a history book!
In the 20th century, people feared that Orwellian state will control people by supressing thinking and limiting information.
But the situation become even worse - we have people who don't want to think and instead rely on The Government to decide what's good for them, and information is so widely available that people became saturated with it and no longer desire it.
If you post as an AC, don't expect me to spend a mod point on you.
FTC et all don't hate in-app-purchases. They hate getting hassled by parents that are upset because their kids purchase without their knowledge and get stuck paying. FTC is only concerned because they are considering it 'not fair' to the parents. My suggestion is to have a 'parental override password' to do ANY purchases, or don't put in-app-purchases in apps oriented to kids or gaming that under 17 (or 21, or 35, pick your poison) might be interested in. The easy choice is to say 'no in-app-purchases allowed'. The right answer is to have kids respect their parents and do what they are requested and not do in-app-purchases without permission. Our culture has moved to the point that isn't going to happen. Come up with a reasonable solution, get the industry AND FTC to listen, you can be a multi-billion-dollar-hero!
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
In classic Fascist states, the government was totalitarian, but tried to keep industrialists and businesses happy. The economic system remained capitalist. In Nazi Germany, there was one labor union, and it was rendered pretty ineffective. Theoretically, the government could order the businesses to do anything, but as a matter of practice they tried to stay hands-off. (The US War Production Board controlled businesses in WWII more tightly than the typical Fascist state.) Money is important.
In Socialist states, the government normally owns the businesses, and the factory heads and such are government functionaries, to be promoted, demoted, or replaced by the government. There is a strong tendency for central planning, and money often becomes much less significant. It remains important to the worker, but it doesn't necessarily drive the economy as it would in a capitalist society.
There are theoretically other forms of socialism (worker-owned factories, etc.), but those don't tend to be economy-wide.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes