The Federal Trade Commission just announced that Microsoft has been fined $20 million “over charges it illegally collected personal information from children who signed up for its Xbox gaming system without their parents’ consent”.
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The ruling follows a larger one from December 2022, when Epic Games, developers of Fortnite, were hit with a $550 million fine for using “privacy-invasive default settings and deceptive interfaces that tricked Fortnite users, including teenagers and children”.
In this instance, the FTC says the issue centred around the creation of children’s accounts on an Xbox console, a process that until late 2021 would allow a child to enter a certain amount of personal information before requiring a parent’s assistance and permission. Microsoft had been keeping that data (sometimes for “years”), even if the account wasn’t created, which is a violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA).
Microsoft have already responded to the ruling with a post on the official Xbox blog, with Dave McCarthy, CVP Xbox Player Services, saying the violation was a result of a “glitch”, and that Microsoft will “continue improving” going forwards:
McCarthy goes on to explain the details of this “glitch”, and how it led to retention of children’s data despite this being “inconsistent with our policy to save that information for only 14 days”:
The FTC’s statement, meanwhile, says:
