Newly Revealed Documents Show Facebook Gleefully Refusing To Refund Money To Kids Who Ran Up Huge Bills On Mommy's Credit Card

from the coppa-coppa-coppa dept

Because Facebook wasn't looking awful enough already, some newly unsealed documents from a lawsuit going back a few years are now making the company look even worse, and certainly not doing the company any favors in its efforts to rehabilitate its reputation. Unfortunately, so far, Reveal, a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting, seems to only be revealing snippets of what's in the documents, rather than the full documents (come on guys...), but what they're sharing doesn't look great.

Specifically, a judge has unsealed previously sealed records from a 2012 class action lawsuit that was settled in 2016, concerning Facebook profiting off of children. The origins of the lawsuit involved a child who got his mother's credit card to play a game on Facebook, without realizing that the more he played, the more of his mother's money he was spending -- compounded by Facebook then refusing to refund the charges. The latest revelations show that Facebook employees knew that they made this information confusing, in a way that people (kids and adults alike) might not realize they were still spending money off of a credit card, and also having joking conversations about people trying to get their money back. Indeed, the snippet Reveal has released has Facebook employees referring to one teenager as "a whale" -- a term used in casinos to refer to big spenders.

In one of the unsealed documents, two Facebook employees deny a refund request from a child whom they refer to as a “whale” – a term coined by the casino industry to describe profligate spenders. The child had entered a credit card number to play a game, and in about two weeks racked up thousands of dollars in charges, according to an excerpt of messages between two employees at the social media giant.

Gillian: Would you refund this whale ticket? User is disputing ALL charges…
Michael: What’s the users total lifetime spend?
Gillian: It’s $6,545 – but card was just added on Sept. 2. They are disputing all of it I believe. That user looks underage as well. Well, maybe not under 13.
Michael: Is the user writing in a parent, or is this user a 13ish year old
Gillian: It’s a 13ish yr old. says its 15. looks a bit younger. she* not its. Lol.
Michael: ... I wouldn’t refund
Gillian: Oh that’s fine. cool. agreed. just double checking

Fine. Cool. Agreed. Or not. Not cool at all. And that's even if you argue (as some have on Twitter) that the "whale" comment is actually a typo for "whole" (and argument multiple people who worked in the space dispute, noting that "whale"/casino terminology was common in online games).

While you might just chalk this up to a conversation among perhaps lower level Facebook employees with screwed up incentives, Reveal notes that other documents make it clear that people within Facebook knew that their confusing UI was contributing to a problem:

Facebook employees began voicing their concerns that people were being charged without their knowledge. The social media company decided to analyze one of the most popular games of the time, Angry Birds, and discovered the average age of people playing it on Facebook was 5 years old, according to newly revealed information.

“In nearly all cases the parents knew their child was playing Angry Birds, but didn’t think the child would be allowed to buy anything without their password or authorization first,” according to an internal Facebook memo. The memo noted that on other platforms, such as Apple’s iPhone, people were required to reauthorize additional purchases, such as by re-entering a password.

A Facebook employee noted that children were likely to be confused by the in-game purchases because it “doesn’t necessarily look like real money to a minor.”

The documents also note that Facebook didn't send receipts for these purchases, meaning that parents wouldn't know about them until way later when the credit card bill shows up. Oh yeah, also "links on the company’s website to dispute charges frequently failed to work."

While one might try to argue that this is something that happened many years ago, when Facebook wasn't that careful about things, the company's reaction to these documents finally being revealed isn't great either:

In response to a request for an interview, Facebook provided a one-sentence statement: “We appreciate the court’s careful review of these materials.”

That's... not going to cut it. In the past year, almost every internet company I talk to is simply seething about Facebook and how it's basically destroying everything with the hamfisted way it deals with... almost everything. The company's ongoing and never-ending "apology tour" isn't changing anything, and if the company can't figure out that it has to take real ownership of its many problems, past and present, it's never going to fix them, nor rebuild trust. Responding with that sort of PR speak, rather than saying "we royally fucked up, but that was many years ago, and here are all the concrete steps we've taken to fix this" is just incompetent. The company has been in the limelight for so long yet it still doesn't seem to fathom how to deal honestly with a press that is calling out its many faults. While it is true that plenty of press coverage of Facebook in the past year has been misleading or unfair, the unwillingness of the company to take its real problems seriously, is a huge issue not just for Facebook, but for every other internet company as well.

Filed Under: coppa, credit cards, kids, online games, refunds, whale
Companies: facebook

NPR Posits Nazis Are Recruiting All Of Our Children In Online Games With Very Little Evidence

from the nein dept

At this point, journalistic handwringing over the assumed dangers of video games has moved beyond annoyance levels and into the trope category. Violence, aggression, becoming sedentary, and the erosion of social skills have all been claimed to be outcomes of video games becoming a dominant choice for entertainment among the population that isn't collecting social security checks, and all typically with little to no evidence backing it up. This has become so routine that one can almost copy and paste past responses into future arguments.

But NPR really went full moral panic mode with a post that essentially claimed the recruitment of children into rightwing and Nazi extremist groups is a full on thing, while an actual analysis of what it relied on to make that claim reveals, well, very little of substance at all.

Yesterday, NPR published an article titled “Right-Wing Hate Groups Are Recruiting Video Gamers.” It’s the latest, most exaggerated version of a gaming-flavored narrative woven by elite media orgs in an apparent attempt to explain the rise of right-wing extremism in America. This article claims that games “have become one avenue for recruitment by right-wing extremist groups”; to support this, the reporter opens her story with a tale of a 15-year-old Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player whose father, John—no last name given—was one day startled to see neo-Nazi propaganda his son had printed out.

Yesterday’s NPR article, which attempted to make this case, was riddled with the sort of factual elisions one would expect out of propaganda journalism. On the basis of one real-life example and three interviews with apparent experts, the writer claims that gamers are getting plucked out of shooty-shooty games and dropped right into neo-Nazi forums. The most basic problem here feels beneath mention: inflating one anonymous father and his anonymous son’s journey through the bad net into an entire movement is preposterous. Had the reporter spoken to even two, three or four kids who had been rescued from the clutches of Fortniteextremists, it still wouldn’t have been enough. “Where,” one would ask, “is the sense of scale?”

And, as Kotaku notes, the problem of the scale in all of this leads one to the next obvious question. If this were really happening at a level that would warrant sounding the parental klaxons, then how has it been missed by gaming journalists, journalists writ large, the federal authorities, and the federal government? Are we really expected to accept, all on the back of one anecdotal story and a couple of experts contacted for comment, that the much wider world has missed Nazi recruitment in online gaming entirely? I don't know if ya'll have noticed, but there's been a bit of a focus on Nazis and white nationalism as of late. This just flew entirely under the radar?

Even the experts cited in the NPR piece leave very much to be desired. Christian Picciolini, who I have heard speak in other forums and who I generally found to be bright and trustworthy, comes off as simply looking foolish when asked to flesh out his concerns as outlined in the NPR post.

Picciolini, who describes himself as a “former white supremacist leader,” came onto Kotaku’s radar in July, when he hosted a Reddit AMA. In it, he claimed that right-wing extremists go into multiplayer games to recruit vulnerable demographics into their cause. Intrigued, my colleague Kashmir Hill and I reached out to Picciolini to hear more. We were curious about the right-wing movers and shakers who could fit an entire political pitch into a Fortnite match.

When we asked Picciolini for evidence of his claim and an interview, he referred us to “the many who have experienced the recruitment” and attached a few screenshots of Nazi imagery in open world games like All Points Bulletin. He also forwarded a screenshot of the game Active Shooter, a school shooting simulator, which was pulled from Steam before its release. Another screenshot was from a YouTube video titled “Fag Jews” in which someone named AuTiSmGaMiNg played Call of Duty. It had 11 views.

If that response is the best that can be mustered, from someone who is supposed to be an expert witness to the core claim that Nazis are recruiting children in online games no less, then this is going to look like ginned up panic-mongering. And that's a very real problem, given that there are some very serious social issues we're dealing with in this country right now, including issues that surround xenophobic white nationalist groups. That problem does exist, but when the fight against that sort of thing is carried out by people willing to inflate the concerns on the specifics, it's easy to see how this can all result in a boy who cried wolf scenario.

Given the large swaths of the population now playing video games on the regular, a post like NPR's can only serve to damage its reputation for journalism.

When fear-mongering moves into spaces that require rigorous investigative reporting and large-scale interviewing, it stumbles into the danger zone of modern journalism: “This wild, but unlikely thing is happening, widely. Please panic.”

That sort of thing might sell as a story in the short term, but it does long term damage in building trust with the reading audience. That's far more dangerous, actually, than whatever tiny number of Nazis are actually trying to lure kids into Nazism via the video game vector.

Filed Under: evidence, moral panic, nazis, online games, recruiting, video games
Companies: npr

2 Teen Diablo Players Were Charged, Got Probation For 'Stealing' Virtual Items That Were Replaced

from the virtually-dastardly dept

With some of the recent news stories about how cheating, or other crimes, committed in virtual settings is resulting in real-world legal consequences, I'm sort of surprised the media hadn't picked up on this story before. Apparently back in the summer of 2012, two teenagers, Patrick Nepomuceno and Michael Stinger, ran a scheme in Blizzard's Diablo 3 in which Stinger would send out a link to another player that allowed Nepomuceno to take control of the player's computer, force the player's character to drop all of his/her valuable virtual game items, and then Stinger would scoop them up.

According to [Prosecutor] Wilkison, court documents, and an interview with Michael Stinger, Nepomuceno bought a RAT, a ‘remote access tool’ used to take over a computer remotely. Nepomuceno and Stinger got other Diablo III players to download the RAT by disguising it as a link to a photo, which they claimed was a screenshot of a rare item. After a player clicked on the link and downloaded the RAT, Nepomuceno gained access to their computer, and was able to take over their Diablo character. He would force the character to drop all of the valuable gear and gold the player had collected, and Stinger’s demon hunter character, who was hanging out nearby in the game, would swoop in to steal the goods. “Imagine you are a gamer and you have worked long and hard to get all these items,” said Wilkison. “The victim watches himself lose everything.”

Court documents insist that the pair then sold these virtual items for thousands of dollars, something which Stinger at least disputes. Blizzard banned the pair once the reports of the virtual "theft" began rolling in, but the company apparently wasn't satisfied with that as an end to the story. Instead, Blizzard brought in the FBI, who raided Stinger's house and made off with his computer equipment. Nepomuceno declined to be interviewed, but his equipment was likely confiscated as well. Blizzard, for their part, restored the virtual items to the victims, which is where the legal part of this story gets very interesting.

But how do you prosecute a crime with no actual losses? “Blizzard gave the victims the goods back,” said Wilkison. “That made the loss calculation difficult because the victims were reimbursed. So instead we calculated the [perpetrators’] gain.”

It's an interesting question, I think, because if the victims are the players, they suffered no loss. Blizzard could be said to be the victim, but their restored virtual items carry a real-life worth that is nebulous and subjective at best, so I would think assessing any kind of value to the items for the purposes of declaring a felony would be quite difficult. The two virtual muggers apparently didn't want to fight this out in court, however. Both accepted probation and were forced to pay Blizzard back for the costs of investigating their actions. Notably, it does not appear they were forced to pay the company back for the worth of the virtual items, which seems strange since their worth was the basis for the felony prosecution to begin with. The real crime, it would seem to me, was the unlawful access of another person's computer in all of this, but the discussion around a felony for theft of virtual items took the main stage.

Theft of virtual items in which no loss actually occurrs to the victims, something that we've actually discussed before, almost a decade ago. Given that the question apparently hasn't gone away, the legal world is going to have to figure out how to navigate these virtual waters, and I don't think tossing around felonies strictly for the crime of stealing virtual items in a video game is a good route to take.

Filed Under: arrests, michael stinger, online games, patrick nepomuceno, stealing, video games, virtual goods

EA Sued For Shutting Down Online Games Too Quickly

from the shall-we-play-a-game? dept

Electronics Arts continues to suffer from a case of fans-hate-us-itis. Wonderfully hilarious mishaps like the SimCity debacle, calling their critics homophobes, and simply shutting down social media games without refunding the money for in-app purchases culminated in the game publisher obtaining the coveted Worst Company In America award...again. With all that having happened in the last year or so, executives at EA are probably thinking the same thing I think when I wake up on the bathroom floor at 4am on a Sunday with the dog looking at me like she's trying to figure out if I'm dead or not: surely this is rock bottom and it can only get better from here.

Well, no it can't. Not for me and not for EA either, now that a federal class action suit has been filed against the company for falsely suggesting in the marketing for their EA Sports titles that online play would last a lot longer than it actually does.

Justin Bassett claims he bought several sports-themed games for Xbox 360 for about $59.99 each, relying on Electronic Arts' representation that the games were enabled for unlimited, online play. But the games were available for only a limited time, he says.

"Had plaintiff known at the time that he would not be able to play the products online for a certain amount of time, he would not have purchased the products or paid the price he paid for the products," Bassett claims.

Now, I don't know if it counts as a conflict of interest that I play a ton of sports games and also find it massively annoying when I can't beat 14 year old Russian children anymore because EA shut down the servers, but I figured I'd disclose that anyway. The fact is that marketing material for these games at the very least gives no indication for how long EA will allow online play and at worst vaguely insinuates that there is no predetermined time limit. Certainly most owners of sports titles don't purchase them every single year, so a time limit of a calendar year seems ridiculous sans a strong indicator that that's the plan. As such, the suit alleges a host of wrong-doings.

"Consumers frequently rely on labels in making purchase decisions. Here, plaintiff and the other class members reasonably relied to their detriment on defendant's misleading representations and omissions. Defendant's misleading affirmative statements about the capability of online play for the products obscured the material fact that defendant failed to disclose about the limited nature of its online support for the products."

Bennett seeks compensatory, statutory and punitive damages for consumer law violations, false advertising, unfair competition, and breach of warranty.

Nobody is suggesting that EA has to keep their online play servers going indefinitely, but reasonable should mean reasonable. There may be some folks out there that buy Madden every year, but most do not. They update their rosters, either on their own or with help, and keep playing that title for 2-4 years. Is a 3 year online play window really unreasonable? And if they weren't going to support online play for that long, shouldn't EA disclose that in their advertising and/or packaging?

Filed Under: expectations, lawsuits, online games

Success Of Free D&D Online Leads To Free Lord Of The Rings Online, Too

from the good-to-see dept

Slashdot points us to the news that Turbine is now planning to offer their Lord of the Rings Online as free to play starting this fall. This follows last year's decision to turn Dungeons and Dragons online into a free offering, which actually resulted in a massive increase in revenue. Nice to see them expanding this to other areas.

What may be more interesting here is that this decision comes soon after Warner Bros. (the studio) bought Turbine. Warner Bros., as a movie studio, isn't exactly known for embracing "free," so it's nice to see that they're actually okay with expanding this program. Maybe they'll actually learn something to take back into the other parts of the business...

Filed Under: business models, d&d, free, lord of the rings, online games
Companies: turbine, warner bros.

Dungeons And Dragons Online Highlights How Free Can Work As A Part Of A Business Model

from the nice-job dept

Pretty much everyone who reads Techdirt seems to be sending over the story of how Turbine has changed the business model for Dungeons and Dragons Online, going away from charging people $50 for the game and then $15/month to play, to a model where you can play for free and there are additional benefits to actually paying. And, so far, it seems like a massive success. Many more people are playing than before... and many of those who would never have paid (or played!) at all are realizing that there are good reasons to pay for some things within the game. While these sorts of situations can be a fine balancing act (if the company gets too focused on trying to convince people to pay, it could make the free stuff annoying), it appears that Turbine has done a good job finding a sweet spot -- making sure that if you just want to play the game for free, you can absolutely do that and it's perfectly enjoyable all the way through. Putting money into it just gives players certain additional benefits that they feel is worth it. Suddenly, paying the company money becomes a reasonable per transaction situation, rather than an ongoing chore. While it's still early, it should be worth watching to see how well this particular business model experiment goes -- but the early indications suggest that it's yet another example of how "free" can work as a part of a business model.

Filed Under: business models, dungeons and dragons, free, mmo, online games
Companies: turbine

Virtual Video Store Clerks Take On The Geeks For Netflix Prize

from the wisdom-of-the-movie-geeks dept

We've been fascinated with the Netflix Challenge for a while now. That's Netflix's offer of $1 million to whomever can improve on their system for recommending movies by 10%. While there were a lot of early success stories in making improvements, all of the attempts seemed to bog down, making much more gradual improvements, but not getting close enough to hit that 10% mark. Earlier this year, we wrote about the surprising run up the leaderboard by a (previously) anonymous individual who approached the problem from a very different perspective, that of a psychologist, rather than a coder, which apparently was quite helpful in getting good results through a very different method.

Now some other folks are trying something completely different, relying on more of a "crowdsourcing" system, combined with a gaming element. They've set up a virtual video store, called Video Store Clerk, and set it up as a game for movie buffs. The game players act as a video store clerk, and can see how particular users rated three movies, and are then asked to predict how they would rate a fourth movie, with points given to correct answers. The idea is that they'll be able to use these crowdsourced predictions to create an even better model than the purely algorithmic model being worked on by various teams.

This reminds me of the research work by Luis von Ahn to do things like tag images via the "ESP Game." von Ahn has had numerous successes in creating fun casual online games, where the output data is actually very useful for taking on some sort of problem that is quite difficult to do algorithmically (such as identifying what's really in an image). The real question, though, is if movie recommendations really work that way as well. Perhaps I need to be a bigger movie buff, but so far, I'm not particularly good at figuring out how others would rank a movie. And, unlike the ESP game, frankly, the Video Store Clerk game isn't all that fun as currently designed. After playing it once, I had no desire to try again. Still, I'm intrigued by the different approach, and wonder if a more advanced (and more fun) version might be much more effective.

Filed Under: competition, games, netflix challenge, online games, video store, virtual store clerk
Companies: netflix

UN Tells Online Game It Can't Have A Fake United Nations

from the even-if-it-does-good-work? dept

Ed Powell writes "On April 1, the online game NationStates, in which players create their own simulated nations, changed the name of its United Nations feature to World Assembly. It claimed that "The (real) United Nations has demanded NationStates 'immediately cease and desist from using the United Nations name and emblem,' as it 'is unauthorized and in violation of the provisions of international and U.S. laws.'" Having seen the previous April Fools' gags the site had pulled, I assumed it was a joke. But, time passes, I return to the site to find that it was not a joke. The UN did send an email to creator Max Barry, demanding that he cease and desist. Of course, it's no wonder the UN wanted to shut the operation down. The NationStates UN passed over 240 resolutions, promoting peace, tolerance, and equality throughout the (simulated) world. Why would the UN want to be associated with that?"

Why indeed? This is pretty strange, as NationStates has been around for many years (I remember seeing it early on and had forgotten that it still existed). Also, calling out the trusty moron in a hurry trademark test, it seems unlikely that anyone would believe that the real United Nations was being represented in an online game. Of course, a few years ago, we wrote about the UN (the real one) getting into the video game business, so perhaps it felt NationStates was a threat.

Filed Under: online games, trademark, united nations

The Way To Beat Scrabulous Is Not With Lawsuits Or Crappy Versions Of Scrabble

from the keep-trying dept

In the ongoing saga of Scrabulous, the unauthorized online version of Scrabble that has found many fans on Facebook but has upset Mattel and Hasbro (who own the rights to Scrabble), it appears that RealNetworks and Mattel have finally put out an official version of Scrabble for Facebook -- but the problem is that it's terrible. As the NY Times reports, "Facebook Scrabble takes a long time to load, does not always quickly update to show recent moves, and the words the game will accept do not reflect standard Scrabble dictionaries, or even the English language." While it's nice to see that Scrabulous still hasn't been forced offline, it seems odd that the authorized version is so terrible. It still probably would have made the most sense to just do a deal with the brothers who created Scrabulous (and there are still rumors that a deal has been discussed, but without a decent resolution), but if that doesn't work, the way to compete is with a better product. Putting out a product that's not very good isn't likely to win over many fans.

Filed Under: online games, quality, scrabble
Companies: facebook, hasbro, mattel, realnetworks

FoxNews Fear Mongering: Online Games May KILL You!

from the sensationalism-at-work dept

In a piece that with just a few tweaks could easily be from The Onion, FoxNews has written up a fear mongering article about online game players. It selectively picks out a few extreme cases where people who met via online worlds ended up doing something bad, and broadens that to suggest that online games like World of Warcraft are a threat that's only going to get worse. To be fair, the article does squeeze a few quick quotes in the middle from folks who point out that the premise is highly exaggerated, but it brushes them off and quickly goes back to fear mongering. It includes typical fear-inducing sensationalist statements like: "But some hook-ups have had deadly consequences" (you can practically hear the scary voiceover voice saying it). The article offers nothing in the way of proof that anything described in the article is a common occurrence, instead just offers scary words and conjecture not supported by facts: "You're going to see a lot more of these stories, unfortunately." Oh really? Then how come as these games have become more popular, violence has been dropping? How soon until we see Congress start looking into laws regulating online games?

Filed Under: fear mongering, foxnews, online games, violence
Companies: fox, news corp.