Federal Judge Rules Amazon Must Refund Parents Duped By In-App Purchases (gizmodo.com)

An anonymous reader shares a Gizmodo report: A federal judge has ruled Amazon is liable for billing unwitting parents after their children made unauthorized charges in apps. The court will decide exactly how much money Amazon owes customers in the coming months. The federal judge's decision asserts that Amazon received several complaints from customers about in-app purchases that they were unaware of, mostly incurred by children. The decision points out that Amazon promoted apps as free but failed to inform parents about in-app charges that could be incurred.

Comments

hmmmm

[ganjadude]

maybe dont give your child a tablet with access and a CC linked to it. I mean dont the parents have responsibility for the things they allow their children to do???

Re:hmmmm

[ganjadude]

so you get your kids a tablet that is not your tablet

you dont leave your tablet for the kids to get

no, this is a parenting issue, not an amazon issue

Re:hmmmm

[BitZtream]

Do you have kids, especially any young but mobile kids?

Of course not, he wouldn't have made such retarded statements if he had any experience with either kids or the way amazon does their tablets.

He's just talking out his ass about things he doesn't know anything about.

Re:hmmmm

[JaredOfEuropa]

Yes, parents have such responsibility, and these days you can set a parental lock on devices as well (at least on iPhones / iPads, not sure about others). But the ruling indicates that the warning about in-app purchases was not sufficiently prominent (or even present at all), leading parents to believe that their children were playing completely free games thus requiring no unlinking of CC info or parental supervision, where in fact there was a potential (hidden) charge. Without knowing the details of the in app purchase warning or the devices in this case, it's hard to say if the parents should have been more careful, or if the paintiffs have a point.

Re:hmmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless Amazon facilitated the minimization of all payment notice when devices were purchased, and obfuscated both the process of and need for removal of payment information. It is a customer relations failure, and business law is largely developed on that basis. Amazon was greedy and it caught up with them. Now they will give notice in bright red and orange letters rather than in tiny writing resembling the old illegible disclaimers on tv commercials.

Re:hmmmm

[Solandri]

Amazon requires their app be installed on the device and you to be logged in for any apps purchased from their store to run. Or at least they did when I played around with their store a few years ago (back when they were giving away a free app every day). I just created extra Amazon accounts and bought kids apps that way with rebate credit cards (so they couldn't be used to make more charges after the money was gone). But I expect most parents didn't think that through as much as I did.

Normally an app store will add parental controls which allow you to add a password or passcode to confirm purchases. But Amazon's big thing is one-click ordering, and they like to enable it by default. I had to dig through my settings to find where to disable one-click ordering. I want to see a confirmation page, I want to double-check to make sure the correct credit card is being charged, I want to pick and choose the type of shipping especially since they're now giving free digital credits if I don't need a purchase delivered within 2 days. And most importantly, I don't want the kids to be able to buy stuff on my Amazon account by just clicking things when I happen to step away from the computer for a few minutes because the doorbell rang. Even then, their one-click ordering still bites me now and then. I accidentally "bought" an episode of a TV show when my browser froze. Apparently one of my clicks to try to unfreeze it landed on their one-click order button and went through, and apparently the setting to disable one-click ordering for regular Amazon purchases does not apply to digital purchases - there is a separate setting for that. (They refunded it because the entire series was included with my Prime account, so there was no reason for me to buy a single episode. Not sure what would've happened if that wasn't the case, since their policy is no refunds on digital purchases.)

So yeah, I completely blame Amazon for this one. They are way too aggressive with one-click ordering.

Re:hmmmm

[internerdj]

To be bitten multiple times is suspicious, but frankly it is also kind of BS that it is opt out for what is marketed to be child's account.

Re:hmmmm

[sjames]

Was that there before or after the plaintiffs incurred the unwanted charges?

I see nothing but good coming from this.

[BarbaraHudson]

I see nothing but good coming from this. Less of a proliferation of games that need you to continuously buy stuff to play. We have laws against advertising to children here, but this is exactly what these apps do.

Impossible to lock down IAP

[wardrich86]

The worst part of the whole thing is that there is no way to lock down IAPs with Amazon. You can restrict purchases from the Amazon app store, but if you have a credit card saved to your account, kids have free reign over IAPs - and some app developers take full advantage of this by tossing catalogues of other apps (which you can purchase) right inside their other apps. My son spent about $10 on some of the shittiest apps I've ever seen because of this. I called Amazon at the time and their solution was simply for me to remove the card from my account.