Judge Orders Amazon Refunds for Children's In-app Purchases (reuters.com)

A federal judge has directed Amazon to set up a year-long process to reimburse parents whose children made in-app purchases without permission, but rejected a U.S. regulator's request for a $26.5 million lump-sum payout. Reuters reports:U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, in Amazon's hometown of Seattle, issued his order more than six months after finding the online retailer liable, in a case brought by the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC in July 2014 accused Amazon of making it too easy for children to run up bills while playing games such as "Pet Shop Story" and "Ice Age Village" on mobile devices, resulting in an estimated $86 million of unauthorized charges.

Comments

I blame game developers too

[ZorinLynx]

Rather than create complete, cohesive games and charging a single price to play them, they design the games around having to buy stuff constantly to progress.

I remember when Angry Birds came out; you would buy the game once and that's it. Buy the game, hand the tablet to a kid and they can play all they want without having to buy anything.

These days those games are the exception rather than the rule.

Re:I blame game developers too

[JoeMerchant]

Amazon, and all web retailers, need to understand that they cannot enter binding contracts with minors.

Amazon in particular provides the Kindle tablet hardware with (laughably easy to circumvent) parental controls to prevent children from making purchases without parental permission, and yet, it happens anyway. They have cheerfully refunded all purchases that my children made, but we usually catch these things and start corrective actions within 24 hours or less... maybe it gets stickier if the parents don't notice until later.

In any event, the legal question- being decided in the lawsuit- is whether or not parents can be held accountable for contracts entered into by their minor children. That answer has always been: no, and the fact that children inadvertantly came to possess access to the parent's credit information without the parents' permission does not change that.