Apple Inc will refund consumers at least $32.5 million to settle a longstanding complaint that the technology company billed U.S. consumers for charges incurred by children through mobile apps without their parents’ consent.
Or, you know, you could just look after your kids and take responsibility for what they do.
Honestly, this should be on the app developers who take advantage. If your game is so shallow that you have to make it a free download and then entice children to want these in-app purchases then maybe you shouldn’t be making games.
What happened to making a great game and charging what its worth upfront?
I imagine a lot of the disputed purchases predated Apple removing the 15 minute purchase window.
Apple needs to provide better mechanisms. Parents can’t hover over their children every second.
And no, Restrictions aren’t the option in their current state.
Agree. It’s impractical and in fact irresponsible to simply blame parents.
Yep. Just copy Android, again [hehe, j/k], and give us profiles. It just makes sense. Lean over the cubicle and ask for the source to OS X’s sign in/profile implementation.
It would, IMHO, resolve the whole matter ’cause then Restrictions could be applied accordingly.
It wouldn’t solve anything because the parents would still have to make sure it’s their user that’s logged in, not their kids’. Applying restrictions are their prerogative as well. How many mechanisms have to be added to a phone before it becomes the parents’ responsibility? None of that stuff will stop a parent making the mistake of letting their kid buy a bunch of crap on their phones.
I love the argument that parents can’t watch their kids all the time. It’s a parent’s responsibility to watch their kids. Sure, it doesn’t always happen and mistakes happen, but the parent has to take responsibility for their mistakes. These parents made mistakes by either being ignorant of what was going on or not being mindful of it. Ignorance doesn’t excuse anyone from their responsibilities.
These parents’ crying to Apple about their money spent due to their indolence are children themselves expecting their parent, Apple, to take care of it for them. They’re sad, pathetic people, and I feel sorry for their children.
If you can’t take responsibility of your children don’t procreate in the first place.
I disagree. Right now there are zero legit options for protection. Adding profiles gives them the ability to easily switch to the new profile from Control Center, for example, to the kids which has the restrictions set.
Watching a kid is one thing but I think you’re smart enough to know I didn’t mean it in the parenting sense. Sitting beside a kid and watching their every single swipe and button press is simply a ludicrous request.
You’re definitely off-base though when it comes to parents being failures and looking for their “parent Apple” to save them. Way off-base.
No, they’re really not. Using a separate Apple account for purchases vs. the regular iCloud account works perfectly now, though.
So you create two Apple IDs and juggle them separately for iCloud and App Store/etc.
How does that protect?
[no tone/sarcasm, serious question]
You know, I kinda got used to Dalrymple being an ass to companies that don’t have an apple logo, but being an ass to parents who got screwed by shitty app developers who have psychologists on staff to effectively trick kids into giving them their parents’ money? Feels like a low blog even for Jim.
That’s a joke, right?
While I’ve no doubt that a small percentage of these are genuine mistakes, many of the disputed purchases cover periods of MONTHS.
To me, there are only two reasonable explanations for the majority of these claims:
Parents giving an insufficient number of fucks about what their kids were doing on these games, and thinking only about the easy babysitting that was being provided.
Parents who knew it was their own fault and said nothing until they heard about a class action that was going to shake Apple down for some easy money.
The ages of some of the kids involved in this is ridiculous. I would occasionally let my son play games on my iPhone when he was about 4, but only when I could be sat right next to him the whole time (waiting for a haircut or something like that). I would be watching him, and I would be making sure he wasn’t buying anything.
As he got older I would let him play for a little longer, but he always understood the issue of in-app purchases because I explained it to him. You know, like a Parent.
He’s now 9 and my original iPhone 4 has “trickled down” the family for him to use. But the SIM has been removed and everything from Internet access to In-app purchases are all turned off. I appreciate that option isn’t open to everyone, but if I hadn’t been able to do that I wouldn’t have just given him free run of my phone and my Apple account. And the first time I’d seen him rack up any purchases would have been the last time he’d got to use my phone!
When the in-app purchase system launched, it was a nightmare for even the most attentive parent. I hate to break it to Jim and others, but there are times as a parent of 3 children that I can’t be with them every second of every moment. If I download a kid friendly app, set it up for them on my iPad, which is password protected, on which I have even enabled Guided View, I think it’s then safe for me to go change the baby’s diapers and prepare dinner. To some of you that makes me an irresponsible parent. Bullshit. If you think it’s possible to watch each of your children every moment of the day you’ve never been a parent.
When the in-app system launched predatory developers jumped all over children apps like dealers pushing drugs. Most parents thought they were safe if they had in-app purchases password protected, not knowing that if they purchased something for their child they had opened a 15-minute window of freedom for the child to go nuts. And trust me, a 3 or 4 year old pressing cool buttons doesn’t realize they’re spending real money. It was a shameful practice and Apple had a role in it.
Do I think the FTC should have piled on after a settlement? Absolutely not, it’s ludicrous. However, to write this off as nothing more than bad parenting is just as ludicrous.
why cant you disable IAP? or require passwords all the time? PITA on your own device, but youre arguing this is a child’s device. seems fine to me.
it requires the password for IAP purchases. you know the password, youre annoying brat doesnt.
whats unclear? be specific.
did you guys whine to the long distance phone companies for the past 60 years, when any kid could pick up a phone and make expensive long distance or even 1-900 calls? tell us — what did the telephone carriers do for you? refund it all? offer password options?
or, did they do absolutely nothing and you just realized it was your own job to manage your brats?
It’s not much juggling. iOS even offers to guide you through setting this up on first run. You use one AppleID for iTunes Store, one for iCloud (and everything but iTunes Store).
The store account password is required for every purchase, including IAP. That’s all there is to it, really. Child doesn’t know that password, they can’t spend money.
Some things (Find my iPhone, I think?) will ask you to authenticate the other AppleID, with the other password. Child can know that one.
Instructions (dated; it’s easier now, and was even when this document was last updated!) are here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4895?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
No, if it is a child device, no problem. That’s not the case the majority of the time.
These are parent devices the child is using, at least in my case and the one’s I’ve read.
No, because you could…you know…block long distance. 😉
Well, not exactly a nightmare. Once I heard about the problem, I just turned off the iPad after buying something. Child turned it back on, but was no longer able to make purchases.
The first round of parents who discovered this have my sympathies nonetheless.
As did I, and I never suffered as a result, but with in-app purchases priced as high as $99.99 (bucket of gems, magic pony dust, whatever), there were parents hit with $1,000+ bills from just one 15 minute session. To make a blanket statement that it’s simply the result of bad parenting is a load.
Hehe…that’s seriously not a legit solution.
For every purchase you have to restart is something I’d expect from another company, not Apple.
[responding to both kyron and Steven here]
Steven
So you have to give your child one of your passwords that controls your content, data, email, etc for iCloud. Again…not a great solution.
Kyron
See 15 minute window discussion above.
Point is, you have to reconfigure your device to ensure it is kid friendly vs having a solution allowing you to configure it for kids without sacrificing your own experience.
Sure, it’s terrible. But it falls under the milestone for “nightmare” by several inches, I think. 🙂
HAHA…true.