I do see this as a complete parenting failure. Given she had such access that she can not only spend $64k, but also spend without daily / weekly / monthly limits, and also have access to chat logs (on her parents' phone ig?) and somehow was able to delete transactions (???) -- makes all that kind of the fault of the parents.
Locking down a phone is not hard, even for mostly tech-illiterate people. It's a feature built into e.g. iPhones. This includes the parents having to manually authorize payments, app installations, and so on. This is a feature that has existed for a long time.
Further, did the parents not notice her daughter looking at her phone so much? According to the article:
> a teacher called to say she thought the girl might be addicted to mobile games after noticing how much time the 13-year-old spent on her phone
Maybe these parents are just busy, or maybe this is the lesson they needed to learn that a phone isnt a replacement parent. But it's also likely that they're raising an "ipad kid", where the phone & games are used to shut the child up so the parents dont have to put in any effort.
"pay for it now with time w/ baby, or pay for it later with therapy"
sounds like it was a 64k thing instead, but same idea.
Years ago, I did discover that one of my kids had done some in-app purchases coming from my credit card which I never authorized. I immediately reverted it, and complained to Google that unauthorized purchases should not be possible. It's utterly ridiculous that it was possible back then. I hope they fixed that. Payments should always require explicit authorization from me to my bank.
if the kid stole the credit card information and used it, then it's not ridiculous - it's the same as stealing cash.
It is the responsibility of the parents to punish the kid for stealing. They should know its not allowed - whether google did not confirm it or not is besides the point tbh.
Yeah right...
By 13 you’re mostly developed. You lack life experience so you’re a little naive and you lack the final development of the brain but you’re basically a finished person.
There’s no way that at 13 you don’t understand that spending 64k is wrong. That’s an absolutely absurd amount of money. It’s like when people like you say they don’t know murder is wrong. You don’t have to be 25 to know stealing 60k is wrong.
From the article: “China has long held a dim view of video games, calling them "electronic drugs" a few years ago. It only allows those under 18 to play online games for one hour, between 8 pm and 9 pm local time, on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays.”
Maybe that totalitarian regime is onto something? A broken clock can be right… etc.
It should not fall to the state to regulate it, but to the parents to teach and raise the child. How did the grandparents do it when electronics hadn't existed back then?
that is just shifting the blame to some external entity for "allowing" this to be possible - a slippery slope to the idea of a nanny state.
The parent's responsibility is to raise the child to behave properly. This includes examining their actions, and consider the consequences. Free use of a mobile phone is not good parenting.
and they have to, eventually, bring in dark patterns because them stock prices have to go up. it's really just a countdown until the blatantly questionable behavior.
if parents did their jobs perfectly all the time there wouldn't be school shootings, childhood obesity, or plenty of other social ills impacting young people. these are systemic issues, and need to be handled on a system-level.
Basically every modern society recognizes that people need to be protected from themselves in some capacity. For the same reason we don't have true capitalism.
I would say that many things shouldn't cost that much money. Or not allowed to be served at that high price...
I'm also against most forms of ads for example.
Alternatively a 1:1 conversion rate to strengthen the connection between price and "value".
Another idea might be to require a "cart" -> check out workflow with mandatory price information (again in real currency). Anything that increases friction is good if you ask me.
I'm fine with starting with games and adding other type of apps as we go.
Perhaps they were expecting a few harsh words at most and that was a price they were "ready to pay".
"Being mocked by the other kids" and "going a little bit over budget" could have sounded equally bad in their young mind.
It's fair to assume that they didn't intended to hurt their family this much and this is one reason why society severely restricts what people can do at this age.
I had a job at 13 and would've spent my own money on something like this.
We treat adults like children so children behave like infants.
If you don't pay attention, when purchasing an app or anything else the first time, you enable by default the "fast workflow" that doesn't require authorization for the following purchase.
It's also hard to find the setting again in the play store app.
All is made to reduce friction when purchasing... Which doesn't align with the goal of most parents.
they will nod their heads and put in some controls, but eventually the dark patterns will come out again.
That was the authorization.
I'm not hostile, I'm just explaining that playing a game is not the same thing as authorizing a financial transaction. I don't understand why you insist that they are.
An online financial transaction should at the very least require a password or pin code. Preferably a redirect to my bank where I authorize the transaction through my bank's authorization mechanism (which uses 2FA). I go out of my way to disable everything that doesn't do that, including pin-less NFC payments on my bank card. At the time, I'd also set Google Play Store to always require a password (which should really be the default), and yet it executed a payment without it.
To suggest that a simple button click in a game played by children should be enough to access my money is ridiculous.