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

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