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Court documents reveal Facebook targeting children for whale spending.
anemo
Member RarePosts: 1,903
Just straight to the link here: https://www.revealnews.org/article/facebook-knowingly-duped-game-playing-kids-and-their-parents-out-of-money/
So essentially Facebook bosses refused to implement multiple recomendations by both their own portal developers, and their game developer clients. In order to keep the faucets open to over spending by kids.
With internal communications revealing that upper bosses did math to figure out it was more profitable to have absurdly large chargeback rates. Along with purposefully having a buggy billing system (in article mostly about missing receipts), and purposefully terrible customer support so that using Facebook's own channels were impossible to use.
Along with all levels of Facebook knowing of this, AND further encouraging their 3rd party game developers to make it easy for kids to spend.
Also has a really cute Facebook Internal name known as "Friendly Fraud".
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So I'm sure quite a few here are going to be amused seeing both Social Media AND Free to Play getting bashed about. I know I am.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
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Sometimes the spin is so intense that you're left wondering if they're even reporting on the same event !
For instance, in the BBC's version of this story, FaceBook launched an internal investigation when the maker of Angry Birds complained about a high level of chargebacks.
They identified the source of the problem: Unauthorised in-app purchases by minors !
Facebook's programmers then offered a few suggestions to management, which would have significantly reduced the chance of those purchases occurring...
HOWEVER, Facebook's management declined to act, because "it would negatively affect revenue" !
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46998055
In our wonderful modern world, you can even select your own version of the "truth", lol
What should be is the amazing number of people who think allowing businesses to shirk ethics so freely is the best status quo.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
Thankfully Facebook is not getting a dime from me
My SWTOR referral link for those wanting to give the game a try. (Newbies get a welcome package while returning players get a few account upgrades to help with their preferred status.)
https://www.ashesofcreation.com/ref/Callaron/
"Most of the ordinary employees at <Company X*> are good and responsible people, but management has sold it's soul and only cares about KPI's, performance bonuses and stock options"
*For <Company X>, substitute the name of any Fortune 500 business...
But it would be shocking for most other businesses. Most businesses shy away from business practices that will lead to an unusually high chargeback rate. Indeed, it wouldn't be an unusually high chargeback rate if everyone did it.
Most prominent businesses also have a reputation to protect. Not all; Facebook is hardly the only business in the world that just wants to make money today and doesn't particularly care about their reputation. But you know that that's what you're getting if you do business with them.
And that's why I'm not really that sympathetic to the people who had to go through the fuss of doing a chargeback. They knew that they were dealing with Facebook. What did they think was going to happen? At some point, declining to deal with particular companies that you know are scum has to be at least part of the solution.
You didn't quite call for more government regulation to address situations like this. But when such regulations happen, sometimes the effect is to tack on a bunch of compliance costs for the honest businesses. In the worst cases, the offenders that the regulations are nominally designed to constrain find loopholes or just ignore them.
From a regulatory perspective, the first thing to do is to check if this is a violation of regulations that are already on the books. If so, then you might be able to hammer Facebook over it without needing to create more. If not, then the question becomes whether you can narrowly target something to stop Facebook doing this without penalizing the many businesses that aren't pushing credit card fraud.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
It's just that modern media has given the "common man" a slightly clearer glimpse of what the people at the top get up to.
"The simple is the seal of the true and beauty is the splendor of truth" -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Authored 139 missions in Vendetta Online and 6 tracks in Distance
Banks are fully aware that companies like Facebook who essentially process on behalf of many companies, can hide super high chargeback rates that come from specific companies. And they allow much higher overall chargeback rates because the volume is so high.
The merchant side of card processing has always been a bit shady. One of my clients that I dumped because me and my partners just thought the guy was shady and we didn't even know about his background (google ken taves), later went on to commit what was at the time the largest credit card fraud in history. The banks were giving him their databases of known good customers, supposedly as a 'white list' to filter against. Which this guy then took and just charged the entire list and stashed the money off shore.
Another time I heard from people that know about a company that got to a 45% chargeback rate before being shut down by the bank.
They way credit cards work the banks that process transactions simply don't care about the consumer. And the laws that are in place don't help, these guys get away with completely unethical practices every day.
That was the point of my post. This resigned acceptance is a sign of just how conditioned we are to the idea that big business will do what it wants, how it wants, most of the time, and the consumer is pretty powerless to affect that. In countries where they're allowed to lobby politicians, you will never find a consumer group able to coordinate and lobby at the same level. That's due to the very inequitable nature of the two parties' positions and member composition. Very, very, very few governmental bodies are willing to address that inequity to the degree it truly exists.
Everyone wants to believe they're good people, even if their actions result in harm to others. The bomb-jacket-wearing martyr doesn't believe himself to be a mere mass murderer; he believes himself to be serving a greater good.
The insurance company doesn't believe itself responsible for jeopardizing patient care due to overly obstinate process, instead pointing to other factors that are marginally related or outside of their control as being the real reason the patient's care is truly jeopardized, and using that to justify not improving or changing the process.
A lot of companies try to make money off of repeat business or positive, legitimate word of mouth like that. A company that tries very hard to consistently provide the goods, services, or payments that they've promised to their customers, employees, suppliers, and investors is being ethical. There's a lot of money to be made in a lot of industries if you can do that efficiently enough.
And there are also some companies that have figured out that you can make a lot of money for a while by mistreating everyone you do business with. In some cases, it's because they cater to customers who don't care if they're mistreated; that's definitely Facebook's model. If you don't like that, then don't do business with companies like that. If you can help for it to be profitable for companies to provide good products at good prices, then that's what the world will have more of.
To move to PC gaming, it seems like most of the time that a big developer or publisher does something outrageous, Electronic Arts is the culprit. If a similar scandal in which a major MMO publisher was making a bunch of arguably fraudulent charges on people's credit cards, it wouldn't be that surprising if EA were the culprit. It would be shocking if Blizzard, Square-Enix, or a lot of other major companies were. A lot of other vendors have a reputation to defend.
What you can and should do about it is to do business with companies that behave as they ought to and not with those that don't. I don't mean that every purchasing decision should be driven primarily by ethics. I do mean to avoid the handful severe, repeat offenders. Don't blame an entire industry for the misdeeds of one company in it.
Corporate ethics should be about treating properly everyone that the corporation does business with, including delivering what you've proposed. This includes but is not necessarily limited to:
1) provide customers with good products at good prices
2) provide employees with good wages and a good working environment
3) provide suppliers with your payments in a timely manner
4) provide investors with a good return on their money
As soon as you inject other, unrelated things into the banner of "ethics", it starts to crowd out the central things.
Absolutely, companies being regarded as "too big to fail" is a huge problem. When a company figures out how to survive by maintaining a good reputation with politicians but not customers, we've got a huge problem. The underlying problem is when politicians or bureaucrats decide which companies are successful and insulate them from market pressures.
But it's not a universal problem, and there have been plenty of enormous companies that did fail.
Somewhere in my conclusion I wrote "When the investors, shareholders and, most importantly the customers, find out about any decision you make, will they think it's unethical? Notice that I didn't' say "if". You have to act as if every phone is bugged. Every computer is hacked and every meeting is recorded. If you act in that manner, and always ask yourself "What happens when", then you will never find your name rightfully being slandered in front of the world."
The problem with some of these tech and social media companies, is that they are run by people who were catapulted into sudden and swift success before they had a chance to learn any of this. They're so young and so hungry to hang onto success that they don't stop to ask "What happens when..." often enough.
"What happens when our users find out that we knowingly allowed their kids to make purchases without blocking them, informing their parents immediately or taking any kind of active precautions?" That simple question, if asked, should have put a lump Zuckertards throat as soon as he asked it, but he didn't. Either that or he's a sociopath... and the Jury's still out on that.
When I buy something online, there's generally a final confirmation that makes it abundantly clear that this will cost you exactly this much money to buy such and such. Are you sure you want to proceed? That's commonly the case even for microtransactions in games where you're spending the in-game currency that you've already paid real money for. Sometimes it's even true of spending in-game currency that is acquired by playing the game, not by paying real-life money.
The news reports say that Facebook didn't do that, but had a system that allowed charging a credit card when people didn't realize that they were being charged. I'm not sure that fraud is the right word, but it's certainly the sort of thing that a reputable company wouldn't do, at least apart from a brief bug that they fix as quickly as they possibly can.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
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If a person isn't really saavy with how MMO subs work they might not understand what they got into.
A friend of mine who is not a computer illiterate ran into such an issue until she caught on to this sort of practice. Fortunately she didn't lose much before stopping it.
The mobile game industry is rife with this sort of thing and the practice is predatory at best, criminal at worst.
They didn't self name it as "friendly fraud" for no reason.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon