> While the girl said she didn't understand much about money or where it came from, she knew to delete chat records and payment transactions to hide evidence of her spending from her parents.
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.
I'm extremely reluctant to let my kids spend money on in-app purchases, and I'm extremely reluctant to do it myself. My youngest is currently begging for Robux, but he can't explain what he wants to spend them on. My oldest has his own allowance that he's free to spend how he likes, and a lot of it is going to purchasing various games, but the amount he can spend is very limited and he seems to be pretty careful about what he spends it on. I think a shared hosted Minecraft server with some friends is his latest expenditure, and I guess that makes sense.
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.
> discover that one of my kids had done some in-app purchases coming from my credit card which I never authorized.
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.
No, the kid didn't steal anything. Just clicked the button to buy the in-game stuff, and Google deducted it from the credit card tied to my account without requiring any authorization. The fault here was entirely with Google.
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.
Exactly. It's vital that we revert all such payments made without our explicit authorization. This is harmful behaviour from Google, and it's important that they understand that.
No, my child was playing the game. The game is not my banking app, and even my banking app requires authorization on top of clicking a button. Merely clicking a button in a game is not financial authorization, and it's harmful to accept this as if it's normal. It's not.
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.
It's how most of my online transactions are. When I buy online, I'm redirected to my bank's website to authorize the transaction. That's exactly how I want it. Only Google and Amazon and a few others require less secure transactions for some reason. I don't like that.
To my big frustration, yes. I'd like international payments to use a similar system. It's why I don't buy from Amazon and avoid other webshops that don't support this. Fortunately Steam and GOG.com do. As do all the Dutch webshops. But Lego.com unfortunately does not.
Obviously she understood that she was doing something bad. It's weird that people on social media expect 13 year olds to understand the value of money when they've never worked for it.
13 years old is old. I don’t know why people are always this revisionist and pretend children aren’t sentient.
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.
It's fairly easy to imagine a 13 old knowing that whatever they are doing is "wrong" but totally underestimating the scale and impact.
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.
My parents never talked about money. Mostly due to my dad's toxic "no one deserves to know how much I make" attitude. I was over 40 before I finally got a grip on financial knowledge - despite me having jobs since I was 14.
At 29, I don't feel like I was "basically finished" until 25 or so, and feel significantly more mature than I was even a year ago. I'm very interested to know why you think 13 year olds are mostly finished developing.
You seemingly state that as a positive goal. I posit that many people would have preferred to be left alone and not killed or subjugated. Perhaps if he had been prevented from those actions until after maturity, he would have chosen different actions.
To rephrase the other user's [correct] sentiment, a scientific determination of brain development has more to do with myelin on axons than maturity regarding emotions, finances, or anything else we actually judge people on.
I understood the value of money before 10 because my parents gave me like 1$ a week to buy candies and I can tell you you need to budget real good if you want them to last until sunday
It's anecdata but I certainly understood the value of money enough to not blow off 64 grand(or really any money without asking always my parents) when I was 13(which was not very long ago for me), and my friends certainly never did such a thing either. She clearly either did know what she was doing, or it's a very unfortunate failure in terms of maturing and acting like a 13 year old. I can't attest to what could cause such a failure but I can't imagine a world where most 13 year olds think it's ok to spend 64 grand on a game(regardless of how predatory it is) with no concern about their activities.
Parents fault. credit cards and bank accounts have alerts. Who doesn't check their account's multiple times per week? Even more so if you give your child Free reign
I don't understand why we as a society allow such ridiculous amounts of money to be asked for in mobile phone app. The first political entity that wants to ban microtransactions has my vote.
> The first political entity that wants to ban microtransactions has my vote.
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?
> allow such ridiculous amounts of money to be asked for in mobile phone app.
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.
I'm not talking about children at all. Adults are just as susceptible. A "nanny" state is a good thing to a degree. All civilized countries place constraints on what the people and companies in it are allowed to do. Simply because leaving it unconstrained will lead to society no one wants to live in.
parents vs. gigantic mega corps with more money than god and the ability to spam all forms of media with ads.
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.
What an absurd statement. By that same sentiment drugs, weapons, organs etc. should be freely available in the market. Which they obviously aren't for good reasons.
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.
Because they are predatory and have ruined the experience of using apps. Apps are trash now, it’s all just gambling and attempts to milk money out of you. People have gone back and changed old apps to add predatory features.
Should bans or price caps be extended to other things? Should they only apply to B2C or also in B2B products? Which fields should they apply to? Who gets to decided what is reasonable ban or price cap for specific item?
I would say that many things shouldn't cost that much money. Or not allowed to be served at that high price...
It should simply be disallowed to allow purchases within an app, product or service. I'm not against high prices, simply against practices that have been optimized to attack weaknesses in the human psyche to extract maximum money.
I would be more inclined to make it so that it is possible for people to buy apps without forcing them to link credit cards or other uncontrolled money withdrawals. I know this would ban those "credit card required for free trial" scams - and I consider every single one of those to be outright fraud. People should not have to spend all of their attention defending themselves from predators.
I'm strongly in favor of banning secondary currencies with varying conversion factors in games.If you want money, price your goods in €/$ etc.
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.
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.