Comment by bachmeier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bachmeier | Hacker News Reader

I had a problem like this a while back. My son was making purchases on an ipod game without knowing what he was doing. They kept putting popups on the screen. He wanted to keep playing, so he closed the popup. What he didn't realize was that it was costing an average of $25 every time he closed the popup. It took about 30 minutes to rack up $200 in charges.

It's impossible to put together a reasonable defense for this. What really pissed me off was that even though Apple eventually refunded the money, they kept making it sound like it was my fault. "You need to turn on this setting in this menu." Nope. Not my fault at all. The setting was turned on but it failed. And even if I hadn't turned it on, why on earth should you need to opt out rather than opt in?

Maybe it doesn't have much of an impact on the industry as a whole. My response has been simple. I've not given my credit card number to any device since. I just don't buy that stuff from anyone.

You can setup family accounts in iOS and anything your children want to purchase is done via request to the parent account. The parent then has to approve the purchase and the purchase is done using the parent's account details.

I don't understand how people are giving children idevices with credit cards attached to them in the first place. This is madness.

Because of shared iPads without shared accounts.

I would never use a real credit card for in app purchases. Call me paranoid, I always use generated cards by my bank service with a fixed amount. It's annoying but I never have surprises.

It's not that difficult to understand. Some people really are unaware of the risks of handing their child an iPad to play a Sonic game. They're unaware of features like family accounts or app store controls to prevent payments.

An argument to this I keep seeing is "well if the parent doesn't understand it then the kid shouldn't be using it." Heck, if my parents only allowed me to play with things they understood, I'd never be in a software engineering career. Parents should be able to make a mistake with a video game an not have to pay _16 thousand dollars_ to recover from it.

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