Senators Ask Facebook Why it Tricked Kids

upnorth

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Jul 27, 2015
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Two Democratic senators have asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to explain why the social network apparently "manipulated children into spending their parents' money without permission" while playing games on Facebook.

"A new report from the Center for Investigative Reporting shows that your company had a policy of willful blindness toward credit card charges by children—internally referred to as 'friendly fraud'—in order to boost revenue at the expense of parents," US Sens. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote in a letter to Zuckerberg today. "Notably, Facebook appears to have rejected a plan that would have effectively mitigated this risk and instead doubled down on maximizing revenue." Because parents didn't know that children would be able to make purchases without additional verification, "many young users incurred several thousands of dollars in charges while playing games like Angry Birds, Petville, Wild Ones, and Barn Buddy," the senators' letter said. Users requested refunds for more than 9 percent of the money Facebook made from children, but the system was stacked against them, the senators wrote. Facebook rejected an employee's proposal to fix the problem and instead "design[ed] a mechanism to automatically dispute its users' requests for refunds, without conducting any review of the requests themselves," they wrote. Markey and Blumenthal asked Zuckerberg a series of questions, and they requested a response by February 19.
 

plat

Level 29
Top Poster
Sep 13, 2018
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Ars Technica's server is down at the moment . :mad: Figures. Anyway, the length and breadth of Facebook's employees' callousness toward its users just keeps giving. Calling a kid who spends thousands a "whale." A few years back, Facebook's stock went down in value, but no one is publicly linking these rip-offs to offsetting those stock losses.

Get a load of Zuckerberg's face in the Forbes article I linked. I want that expression to stick like that for the rest of his natural life.

ars tecn down.PNG
 

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