Things are going from bad to worse for Facebook. The social media giant, which was in the line of fire on various fronts through almost the entire last year, seems to have started off 2019 too on a wrong footing. This comes after legal action from Reveal, the news agency of The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), made the documents of a class-action lawsuit settled in 2012, available for the public. This does put the social network in a rather embarrassing position, since these lawsuit related documents show how Facebook designed its in-game payment systems to trick children into spending money via their parents’ linked credit cards.
The lead plaintiff in the case was a child, who was playing the Ninja Saga game on Facebook and that led to his mother’s linked credit card being charged more than $20 for what were in-game transactions. The child, referred to as “I.B.” in the case, had at that point not realized that his mon’s payment information was saved by Facebook to make transactions, ands believed “these purchases were being made with virtual currency.” However, he continued making the in-game purchases and Facebook kept charging his mother’s credit card. According to the details mentioned in the proceedings at the time, the child’s mom requested Facebook refund the money once she saw the credit card bill, saying she never authorized any charges except the initial $20. However, the company is believed to have refused to refund any money, which forced the family to file a lawsuit against the social media giant. Facebook and the plaintiffs had come to a settlement in 2016.
The court documents which remained sealed away all this while, are finally coming to light now. Facebook on its part now also has to make internal documents public. But what could hurt Facebook the most is the revelation that it knew, and in some ways, designed the system to enable in-game purchases without perhaps be completely transparent about the transaction methods.
“In nearly all cases the parents knew their child was playing Angry Birds, but didn’t think the child would be allowed to buy anything without their password or authorization first,” according to an internal Facebook memo, which is now in the public domain. It is believed that Facebook employees had also been critical of this method. It has been revealed that at the time, Angry Birds was one of the most popular games on the social media platform, and the average age of those playing the game was 5 years. There were many cases in which the charges were disputed by parents as well as children, but Facebook did not refund any charges.
It is also said in the court records that Facebook often failed to send receipts for these charges.
Facebook has a few more days to make its own documents public, and expect some more details to trickle in, which could hurt the public perception against Facebook even more. That is already at an all time low, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the subsequent revelations about data breaches, as well as the role Facebook played in the lead-up to the elections in the US.
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