Which combined Epic Games with the privacy of (young) users?
The lawsuit against Apple cost the Fortnite developer dearly: Epic Games in fact involuntarily turned on a beacon that led the US authorities to investigate the lack of privacy protection that it allegedly offered to its very young players…
What the Big Tech companies combine with our data on a daily basis remains a mystery. We know that we pay for free services or those offered at bargain prices (think, for example, of how much geolocation software could cost you) by ticking the use of mysterious cookies , but where the 'crumbs' that we scatter as we pass end up is unknown. And many Internet users don't even care, because they will think they have nothing to hide.
PAY TO HAVE, EVEN WHEN THE APPS ARE FREE
The fact remains that the consolidated business model of many companies is to provide us with a program at a negligible cost and then resell the data collected during our use to third parties (sometimes even with the app off, it turns out). A situation that requires vigilance over an asset once considered fundamental and today instead debased to a mere bargaining chip, the right to privacy. Be especially vigilant when there are minors on the other side of the screen.
EPIC GAMES PRIVACY SLIP
Epic Games, the Potomac software house founded in 1991 by Tim Sweeney, known above all for being the developer of Fortnite, a video game that had a turnover of 9 billion dollars in its first two years of life, will pay the record sum of 520 million, including fines and refunds, following a settlement with the FTC ( Federal Trade Commission ) over allegations that it violated the protection of children's privacy online and for inducing players to make "unwanted purchases in Fortnite".
THE TWO FRONTS OF THE EVENT: DATA AND MICRO-TRANSACTIONS
Plea bargaining , it must be reiterated, does not mean admission of guilt: it can be used both because waiting for the judge's ruling could be more disadvantageous, and to avoid the bad publicity of a proceeding that drags on for years. But accepting what the US Antitrust has claimed, Epic Games would have violated the privacy of its very young users (under 13 years of age) by collecting personal information without first obtaining parental consent.
On the other front, there is then an accusation that could be even more disruptive for the highly flourishing market of in-game and in-app transactions: that of having broken the laws on the protection of online privacy for children by inducing them to buy game. The most curious aspect of the story is that the US authority would have moved after the well-known Epic lawsuit against Apple . In that situation, you will remember, it was the Potomac software house that dragged the Cupertino giant to court.
THE EPIC VS APPLE CAUSE
In September 2020 Epic Games communicated: “Apple is blocking updates and new installations of Fortnite on the App Store and no longer allows us to develop Fortnite for Apple devices. As such, the new Fortnite Chapter 2 – Season 4 update will not be released on iOS or macOS. Google is also blocking Fortnite on Google Play. But if you still want to play Fortnite for Android, you can access the latest version from the Epic Games Android app at Fortnite.com/Android or the Samsung Galaxy Store.”
And he called fans to social protest: “Epic has taken legal action to end the anti-competitive restrictions of Apple and Google on the mobile device market. Join the fight against @AppStore and @Google on social media with #FreeFortnite”. In doing so, however, the software house turned on the lighthouse of the authorities which led to the proceeding which ended, in fact, with the maxi plea deal.
HOW TO BILL FORTNITE?
Fortnite is free to download. Yet around the brand there is a tour of billions (not millions, billions) of dollars. This is because everything else, essential to play properly and be competitive, is not. In short, there are the notorious micro-transactions in the middle, those that on balance manage to snatch users more than the average market price of a game.
Fortnite charges gamers for in-game items like costumes and dance moves. Most of these are skins for your alter ego: clothes that can refer to the time of year (carnival, Halloween, Christmas costumes…) or licensed from other series that are all the rage. In short, many objects are bought to be fashionable.
IS THERE ALSO AN ETHICAL THEME?
In addition to the legal profiles, there is therefore also the educational theme: do video games push children to unbridled consumerism just to get noticed? Does it instill in young minds that aesthetics are worth more than values? Of course, it's not up to the software houses to educate the new generations, but if we consider that the game has more than 400 million users worldwide, mostly of school age and not all of them will be looked after adequately by their parents, those questions remain carpet and are more than just talk show questions.
THE QUESTIONS STILL WITHOUT ANSWERS
And then, in fact, the question on the use of this data also remains unsolved: what are they and for what purpose would they have been collected illegally: for personalized Adv (advertising which is more difficult to resist) or resold to third parties?
Unfortunately, the plea deal has blocked the investigation so it will be difficult to find out more even if the developers have ensured that they have already corrected the course for some time and that the new versions of the game will increasingly go in the direction indicated by the US Authority.
Even here, however, a question remains: and outside the USA, how does it work? Should individual authorities take action? Will data from young Cambodian users, for example, continue to be collected?
THE CONTENT OF THE AGREEMENT
The settlement includes a record $275 million fine to put a gravestone on alleged violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule , the so-called COPPA rule. This is the largest fine ever for violating an FTC rule.
Additionally, in a first-of-its-kind measure, Epic will be required to adopt privacy default settings for children and teenagers, ensuring that voice and text communications are turned off by default.
This is because Epic Games enabling voice and text chat by default would have exposed children and teenagers to the risk of virtual contact with strangers. And the soliciting of minors online, it is well known, is a rather widespread practice among pedophiles, especially if the virtual square is free, open to all and a meeting place for millions of children.
Under a separate proposed administrative order, Epic will pay the remaining $245 million to reimburse consumers “for its obscure models and billing practices,” to use the US Federal Authority's quotation mark.
Again, this is the largest repayment amount that the FTC has ever managed to extract in a case related to the gaming sector and, according to the US offices, the largest administrative order in history.
FTC: EPIC GAMES HAS VIOLATED THE PRIVACY OF CHILDREN
In short, the sparkling wine was uncorked to the American Authority a few weeks before the end of the year: “As can be seen from our complaints, Epic used privacy-invasive default settings and deceptive interfaces that deceived Fortnite users , including adolescents and children,” FTC Chairman Lina M. Khan said .
"Protecting the public, and especially children, from online privacy violations and shady patterns is a top priority for the Commission, and these enforcement actions make it clear to companies that the FTC is cracking down on these illegal practices".
"The Justice Department takes its mission to protect consumers' privacy rights very seriously," Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said. “This proposed order sends a message to all online providers: the collection of children's personal information without parental consent will not be tolerated.” Now it remains to be understood whether the bad publicity of the plea deal will in any way affect the global success of this video game that bills day and night. Given the precedents, even in other areas, it will hardly happen.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia-on-demand/che-combinava-epic-games-con-la-privacy-dei-giovani-utenti/ on Tue, 20 Dec 2022 14:16:41 +0000.