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Facebook Deliberately Allowed 'Friendly Fraud' To Avoid Harming Revenue (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Newly unsealed court documents show that Facebook was aware that underage children routinely used their parents' payment information to spend large sums of money on in-game purchases, and the company chose not to fix the problem. For years, it allowed for what it called "friendly fraud" because it feared implementing protections would harm revenue, according to the documents. In 2016, Facebook settled a class-action lawsuit brought by parents of children who were tricked into unwittingly making purchases with real money while playing free video games hosted on the social media platform. Despite its recognition of the problem, internal discussions show that Facebook decided it would be best to fight refund requests and allow the problem to persist. Documents related to the case were placed under seal because Facebook successfully argued that releasing them to the public could harm its business. Reveal, a publication run by the Center for Investigative Reporting, argued that these documents were in the public interest; last week, a judge granted Reveal's request to release the documents. On Thursday night, 135 pages from the court proceedings were unsealed, though Facebook was allowed to maintain some redactions.
Just like Facebook's "privacy" settings. On Facebook privacy is not seen to be in the interest of the collective, Comrade.
Corporatism != Free Market
Kind of like how the phone companies will do nothing to stop all the Robocalls, spam calls, and scammers from faking their caller ID. They don't want to hurt the revenue coming from those sources. Who cares about their regular subscribers. At least with Facebook, you are not paying for anything (unless you are stupid enough to give them your credit card info). I log on to Facebook about twice a year. I can't go that long without using my phone.
Inalienable privacy rights would cause facebook to bleed to death, but better still, nothing like facebook could ever grow back.
Social media is cancer that should never have been allowed to spread for 15 years.
Last week I was sitting next to two teenage girls on a 3 hour flight. During part of their conversation, one was talking to the other about someone else who had messaged her, then got upset when she didn't reply.
You know, I haven't even opened Facebook in like 3 months
Actually, now that you mention it, me neither
Who even uses Facebook anymore, anyway.
Yeah, I'm like too busy with living my life. It was taking up so much of my time, and for what?
Life is so much better without it, isn't it.
This went on for some time, as conversations between teenage girls tend to, and I can't bore you with the rest of the details, as I tuned out myself, but clearly Facebook has lost this target audience.
... its customers find that, after getting the run-around, their best recourse is to take the company to court for a remedy, perhaps those details ought to be made public and the company deserves to have its business harmed a little. That would, at least, give the rest of us the opportunity to decide whether we want to begin or continue dealing with that company.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M