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Kid Racks Up $5,900 Bill Playing Jurassic World On Dad's iPad (pcmag.com)
theodp writes: For Mohamed Shugaa, the scariest Jurassic World creature is perhaps Apple CEO Tim Cook, not the Indominus Rex. That's because Shugaa discovered his 7-year-old son had managed to rack up a $5,900 bill playing the Jurassic World game on his iPad in six days. "Why would Apple think I would be spending thousands of pounds on buying dinosaurs and upgrading a game," Shugaa told The Metro. "Why didn't they email me to check I knew these payments were being made? I got nothing from them. How much longer would it have gone on for?" Shugaa discovered his son's 65 in-app purchases when a payment he tried to make to a business supplier was declined. His son had upgraded dinosaurs using the game currency 'Dino Bucks' without realizing it was charging his Dad in real money. The good news is that Apple has decided to refund the money, so the kid doesn't have to worry about Apple making him work 8,500 hours for $5,980 to settle the debt. Btw, before you developers get too excited about the possibility of using In-App Purchase to take kids to the cleaners at $6,000-a-pop, remember that Apple call dibs on the first $1,800!
They require a credit card to install free apps. What gets me is they required password for doing anything on the app store even free apps, but no password to buy thousands in upgrades. It's a deliberate scam, or incredible incompetence. I succpect the latter.
The elephant in the room is that we, as a society, are allowing these games to exist at all. Yes they are entertainment products but they should have limits on their abusive nature. I mean if you can fleece someone for $500 on a game that no one would pay $60 for - good for you you've scammed someone but $5000+ is criminal (or rather should be).
This is a dark pattern which is a user interface designed to trick people into doing things.
I'm surprised how many Slashdotters have replied "he ought to keep closer control of what his kid is doing" and "Apple isn't at fault, they just created the system". Apple is responsible for the user interface and just because the user "could have navigated the user interface" and not had his kid buy the in-app purchases doesn't mean that Apple isn't responsible. "You could have figured out the bad user interface" is never an excuse, especially when the bad user interface is on purpose.
I feel IMHO should be banned on any game targeting an audience below 12 years old. At the very least in-app purchases above a certain amount or accumulated amount should require external authentication, to prevent this exact scenario.
As for the 'in-app purchase are evil' subject, it is because you'll frequently get a free app and then find it goes on to nickel-and-dime the whole experience. What is the real price of a free app with in-app purchasing? Here we saw it was potentially well above $5000. At that price $60 console games look cheap.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
We don't just "allow" them, as a society, we demand them.
We're a society that happily spends $8 on a latte we drink in under a minute but refuses to pay $1 for a game we'd spend hours on.
We're a society that balks at paying a monthly subscription fee to pay for game servers, yet will happily spend far more money on fake items. Think of how many times you've heard of a game "going free to play" and had their profits skyrocket because of it?
The elephant in the room is that, yes, Apple does absolutely think it's possible some guy will randomly spend $6000 on virtual dinosaurs. It happens all the time. And we, as a society, are quite willing to make that possible solely so we don't have to spend our latte-money on a game we'd spend far more time with. We demanded free to play games, and we got them.
As a firearms owner and carrier (30+ years of EDC) I would never, ever want a fingerprint reader or interlock on any of my firearms. When I pull the trigger, I want it to go bang, period.
Going a bit off topic, but if your gun was instead in the hands of your son or daughter pointing it at themselves or others I bet you'd like it to not go bang. Gun suicide and misuse using family owned guns is a much bigger problem than self defense unless you live in an unusually dangerous neighborhood, and before you say they can commit suicide another way studies in the UK after it switched from poisonous coal gas to safe natural gas shows the overall suicide rate falls if you take away an easy suicide method (no more "sticking your head in the oven")