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

[BitZtream]

When you buy an Amazon Fire device it comes linked to your Amazon account unless you specifically tell it not to when buying it by unchecking the tiny checkbox with small print next to it somewhere in the checkout process ... that option ISN'T EVEN AN OPTION ON PRIME NOW PURCHASES. So in all cases, by default, the table comes linked to your CC, and in some cases, you can't even tell it not to be.

I.E. By default, a new Amazon fire tablet ... like ... the kids version for $79 that I bought the other day directly from amazon ... comes already linked to the credit cards on my amazon account and I had to specifically go add an account to the device and restrict it from being able to purchase.

I've purchased the cheapo fire 7" for myself and the kids version for my son so this is from recent direct personal experience that I say this.

Amazon is a shitty company who uses every social engineering trick in the book to rip you off and you let them.

What they've done is as bullshit and they are right to have all of that money torn away from them and should have 3-4x ripped away from them on top as punishment.

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

[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

[Anonymous Coward]

There is something you don't understand. I am a victim of this. I purchased a Kindle Fire kids edition for my 5 year old son. You have to have a parents account on the kindle before you can have a child account on it. To purchase applications at amazon, it won't load from google play store, you have to purchase the app from the parent account. You then give access to the app to the child account. But once you have purchased the app from Amazon, the credit card you used to purchase the app is tied to that application. There is no setting to untie the credit card from the application. So when my 5 year old son sees a screen pop up with a button that says "Purchase the in game upgrade" he automatically clicks on the button. There are no settings to prevent that.

I have had to call Amazon several times and they have refunded my money. But the only way to prevent that from happening is to uninstall the application and to never purchase applications for a child to use. That limits you to only the free apps that can be loaded to the tablet, rendering the Kindle Fire kids edition almost useless.

Nathan

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

[CCarrot]

Get a credit card for this purpose. Buy all the apps you need, then discontinue the card. Problem solved, no more purchases possible with the invalid card registered to the app.

I never registered a card with my android phone - no personal need for pay-apps. It nags, I press the 'later' button. Works fine, and kids can do no worse than dialling a foreign number. Which they don't know how to do - all they know is the contact list and phone numbers are as obscure as IP addresses . . .

It's called a Visa (or MC) gift card, and it's the only CC I'll use for app stores...

So long as you log in to the credit card provider site and set up a 'mailing address' first so the card passes the automated validity check, it should be fine. I've never had a problem with one of these sites rejecting one yet just because it's a gift card...

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.