Judge unseals trove of internal Facebook documents from 2012 legal action

https://www.revealnews.org/blog/a-judge-unsealed-a-trove-of-internal-facebook-documents-following-our-legal-action

by dustinmoris • 8 years ago

212 75 8 years ago

jammygit• 8 years ago

I was talking to my wife the other day about how League of Legends used to accept Subway gift cards as a form of payment. My theory was that it was to get at kids lunch money in case the parents wouldn't give them money for a game - that way they could target vulnerable kids with their systems.

I can't know if I was right or not, and its pretty cynical, but in this other case from the article we have Angry Birds with an average player age of 5 years old using deceptive in-game currencies and gambling/behaviourist inspired design practices to make thousands of dollars off of certain young high risk players.

Every year that goes by I'm shocked this sort of thing continues to be legal

sametmax3• 8 years ago

Before that we had (and still have) Magic the Gathering. I remember spending a huge amount on money on "boosters": packs of random cards with a chance of containing a good or rare one.

Then you had (still have) Mac Donald and their monopoly game.

And you had (and still have) the TV games where you could send a text, and before that call, for a chance to win, with ads during kids show. And before that, you could send a letter.

In France we had a sweet called "mistral gagnant", which you bought because if the sweet was a winner, you'd get another one for free.

I'm pretty sure things existed way, way, before that, I'm just not aware of it.

everdev• 8 years ago

Adults seem pretty susceptible to all of the above as well.

mschuster913• 8 years ago

Before that we had Magic the Gathering.

Similar to Pokemon, you at least got something tangible. Even if MtG or Pokemon shutdown tomorrow, you can still play with your cards until you die, and then your kids can play with them.

Or you can sell them to other kids or collectors.

Then you have Mac Donald and their monopoly game.

Also, here you got a tangible benefit (you got fed).

This is the key difference versus paying for Ninja Wars, or even for non-pay2win-stuff like "skins". The second the game servers get shut down is also the second your collection becomes worthless. And if you're done with the game you can't even sell on your stuff to someone else.

watwut2• 8 years ago

Magic the Gathering was less popular and less known. Less kids ended up putting that much money into it.

It was same money suck and I don't see how its precedence make anything better.

erfgh• 8 years ago

So what?

tokyodude• 8 years ago

Maybe this difference doesn't matter but you can technically play Magic the Gathering by copying the cards or drawing your own. Get out a piece of paper, start drawing the stats on the cards. Play the game.

In other words, you're not paying for the game, your paying to collect cards. I never personally understood it but watched friends, family, and co-workers spent $2k-$5k on cards back in the mid 90s.

That seems different to me in some subtle way from in-game purchases in video games.

sverige• 8 years ago

I have wondered whether MtG wasn't just a clever way to prep an audience to buy into the Bitcoin, um, idea. There are lots of connections between the two, obviously, and I'm pretty sure years ago I heard someone propose that Richard Garfield is or personally knows Satoshi.

sixothree• 8 years ago

Monopoly seems a lot less predatory. You're not paying for a chance to get the company's core product - some food. You're paying for food with a chance to get something extra.

duiker101• 8 years ago

League of Legends recently came out with a new shenanigan, a new skin that is not even particularly good but it exploits the "boxes" system and it's very rare. People calculated that it's could cost at least $150 to get it. It's clearly a tactic to squeeze people out of money more than give something worth.

I too am shocked that this sort of stuff is not looked at closer since I work in the adult video gaming industry and I can see how strict the laws in some countries are around how we CAN NOT ABSOLUTELY have any imagery that could appeal to children. I think it's fair and this sort of games should get regulated too.

MRD85• 8 years ago

These companies spend a lot of money trying to optimise their profits. If the laws tightened up then they would simply try to exploit as much as possible within their legal limits. Mobile applications can make huge profits from exploiting human psychology and I don't see lawmakers being able to effectively curb this anytime soon.

mschuster913• 8 years ago

Jeez. If half the quotes from there are accurate, there should be actual jail sentences for those involved. This is exploiting kids for cash. Utterly reprehensible.

It's bad enough to exploit adults, but kids who literally do not understand the concept of money?! Or doing the internet equivalent of the "snacks display" right besides the supermarket cash register line - make the kids throw tantrums at their parents so that they put up cash. Vile!

CuriousSkeptic• 8 years ago

Why is it still standard to use a single shared card number for non-revocable authorization and no interactive confirmations for online payments?

azthecx• 8 years ago

This is exclusive to Portugal right now, but we have a system called MBNet/MBWay that is supported by all the major banks in which you can create one-time use cards or cards with recurring monthly allowances for use in the same vendor.

It's really well polished and has a lot of other very useful QoL features, such has direct transfers based on cellphone numbers, which allow you to instantly pay dinner debts to your friends. I am surprised to hear it doesn't exist outside pt.

asaddhamani• 8 years ago

Also Privacy.com

peteretep2• 8 years ago

One thing HN has taught me many times is I’m too trustful of people and things. I was defending Theranos way past their sell-by date, and I’ve been refusing to take “Facebook / Zuck is evil” seriously for a long time too. This isn’t a good look for them at all tho

reasonablemann• 8 years ago

My high school had the foresight to have a media literacy class 20 years ago. I never looked at an advertisement the same after that.

mancerayder• 8 years ago

This just isn't being talked about enough. Educating people is one way to help the individual combat deceptive media practices, dark patterns in games and UIs, and much more. Luckily, my parents taught me to loathe commercials, and later political ideals led me to read a lot on the topic of the interaction between media and advertising and ideas, and how propaganda actually works (hint: effective propaganda isn't about lies, it's about showing some truths and not talking about others).

And this was all before the Internet boom and the terrible ad-tech hell we find ourselves in.

Anyway, kudos to your high school.

Cpoll2• 8 years ago

Do you recall what the required reading was?

kodablah5• 8 years ago

Just be mindful that HN (or any outlet these days) will never teach you the positive value of FB for the common person. FB is indeed evil in this case, but be careful not to blindly make over-generalizations with unnecessary correlations. FB, like most, can be good and evil. You don't have to accept the deluge of low quality, substanceless FB op eds the same way you do articles with more objective content. We have the ability to have more nuanced opinions about companies than all good or all evil.

peteretep2• 8 years ago

My point is more that I've found HN's negativity to be more realistic than my natural optimism, over and over again.

blub2• 8 years ago

Facebook has about a decade of privacy fuck-ups, manipulation and dark patterns behind it.

Sure, they're not 100% evil, heck Hitler was a pretty swell guy with his close friends too, but at this point they should be guilty until proven innocent, not the other way around.

The deluge of anti-fb comments is the public finally having enough of their crap, so you should get used to it.

bjoli• 8 years ago

Whether Facebook is evil or not is not really the question. I frame it like this: We have a couple of big companies that make money from one thing: knowing as much as they can about you. Currently they sell ads. We have given these companies an important part of society. So much, in fact, that the choice is not "should I use X" but "should I chose not to use X and face not-so-small consequences for doing so?".

locklock• 8 years ago

For curiosity's sake... we know now that Theranos was never anything more than hot air and marketing. What caused you to defend them at the time?

aleeds• 8 years ago

Probably the same thing that caused it to be worth $9 billion. Holmes was incredibly convincing and had real contracts with huge companies.

sshagent• 8 years ago

How do they know the average age of Angry Bird gamers at the time were 5? Surely they know if they are 13+ (and specific age if so ).

tareqak2• 8 years ago

Quote: The judge agreed with Facebook’s request to keep some of the records sealed, saying certain records contained information that would cause the social media giant harm, outweighing the public benefit.

How does that make sense? If the action Facebook committed was somehow morally reprehensible, but legal?

isomorphic• 8 years ago

The interesting part about that to me is that they don't regard the fleecing-children part to be "giant harm." I.e., the court has records that are even more damaging to Facebook.

dvfjsdhgfv• 8 years ago

That's really troubling. But by now several people have access to this information anyway, so it's just a question of time before we learn what it was.

detaro• 8 years ago

Or they think in that case, the public benefit outweighs the damage to Facebook.

michaelt• 8 years ago

Maybe there was an internal e-mail discussion where they discussed or joked about doing something reprehensible, which they didn't end up doing.

Any project where you detect a vulnerable person so you can protect them, or detect an evildoer so you can block them, you can joke about the fact there's money to be made by doing the reverse. And those jokes would look pretty bad taken out of context, even though you were never seriously considering them.

cirgue• 8 years ago

My bet would be some kind of internal political/interpersonal bullshit that is good for generating hot takes on twitter and not much else.

mamon• 8 years ago

Many things that are morally reprehensible are also legal, e.g. adultery, drinking. The goal of having law is not to make people more moral, it's much humbler: to maintain relative peace and safety.

Don't mix law and morality. Attempts to do so gave us sharia law, let that be a cautionary tale.

tareqak2• 8 years ago

There were many cases of religious law being the law of the land e.g. the Ten Commandments.

revscat• 8 years ago

Maintaining peace and safety are moral impetuses.

lordnacho• 8 years ago

The marginal cost for FB of providing games to a kid like in the example is zero. I'm surprised their support staff didn't just fold when there was a complaint. If they did this might not have ended up in the press.

I can understand if a firm sends out some product that depreciates like a lollipop, they might suffer an actual loss if the purchase was done by a kid.

But in this case it's hard to see anything reasonable about how FB has behaved. Clearly the kids don't want to be spending hundreds of their parents' dollars.

throw2016• 8 years ago

There is now a whole lineup of pro corporate decisions by judges that need more scrutiny and dissent, and some way to return to defending the public interest.

In this case sealing was clearly not in the public interest, at the very least it would have alerted parents, prevented more abuse and increased public awareness of a growing toxic culture.

This would have have produced better outcomes for all parties, including Facebook and their employees by forcing a rethink of their business practices and processes.

renholder• 8 years ago

Edelman declined to say more, citing a confidentiality clause in the settlement.

Confidentiality agreements always keep these kinds of things from coming to light, merely because the cost of breaking them is too damned high.

excalibur• 8 years ago

Yet the company continued to deny refunds to children, profiting from their confusion.
Facebook often failed to send receipts for these purchases, and links on the company’s website to dispute charges frequently failed to work, according to court records.

So if you can't get a refund from Facebook, contact your financial institution and dispute the charges through them. There's no guarantee of success, but you probably have a better shot going that route.

mrguyorama2• 8 years ago

How is not sending out receipts legal?

rahimnathwani• 8 years ago

What law obligates a vendor to send a receipt?

laurex• 8 years ago

"The judge agreed with Facebook’s request to keep some of the records sealed, saying certain records contained information that would cause the social media giant harm, outweighing the public benefit."

What could possibly be more harmful than what has already been released? It's a bit mind-boggling.

trobertson• 8 years ago

A redditor in the /r/technology thread on this recalled that Facebook has performed emotion manipulation experiments in the past. It may be that Facebook was using those capabilities to make kids and teens more vulnerable to ads.

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ahbj8b/federal_...

Judge unseals trove of internal Facebook documents from 2012 legal action

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