Epic Games will have to pay the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over half a billion dollars, following allegations that the Fortnite developer violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and utilised “dark practices” to trick users into spending money.
The FTC claims that Epic Games violated COPPA and “deployed design tricks, known as dark patterns, to dupe millions of players into making unintentional purchases.” Following these allegations, the trade commission has reached an agreement that requires Epic Games to pay $520million in relief.
The alleged privacy violations include collecting the personal information from minors under the age of 13 without the knowledge or consent of their parents. The FTC also notes that parents who asked Epic to delete this information had to “jump through unreasonable hoops,” with the publisher sometimes failing to honour the requests.
The FTC also added that Epic had “harmed children and teens” by having its in-game text and voice communications be on by default. The commission claimed that children and teens have been “bullied, threatened, harassed, and exposed to dangerous and psychologically traumatizing issues such as suicide while on Fortnite.”
Back in 2017, Epic employees apparently pushed for the default settings to be changed in order to require players to opt-in for voice chat, citing the potential impact on Fortnite’s younger players. However, Epic resisted doing so, despite reports of children being harassed in the game – sometimes sexually. While the publisher later added the option to turn off voice chat, the FTC claims they made it hard for users to find.
They also claim that Epic used “dark practices” in order to trick users into making in-game purchases. The FTC blames Fortnite’s “counterintuitive, inconsistent, and confusing button configuration” for causing players to accidentally make unwanted purchases. Players have reportedly been charged while attempting to wake the game from sleep mode, during a loading screen or when pressing an adjacent button while trying to preview an item. The FTC claims that these tactics led to “hundreds of millions of dollars in unauthorized charges for consumers.”
