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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.
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.