Linked List: December 19, 2022

Monday, 19 December 2022

FTC Fines Epic Games $520 Million for Children’s Privacy Violations and In-Game Purchase Dark Patterns in Fortnite ★

Sara Morrison, writing for Recode:

Epic Games, the maker of the very popular Fortnite series, is paying two of the largest settlements in Federal Trade Commission (FTC) history over children’s privacy violations and “dark patterns” that intentionally tricked users into making purchases through manipulative design.

The settlements, announced on Monday, require Epic to pay a total of $520 million for the two consumer protection issues: $275 million for the privacy violations and $245 million for making it easy for consumers to purchase items accidentally and very difficult for them to cancel or refund those purchases. That money will be refunded to consumers; it’s the largest refund amount in a gaming case as well as the largest administrative order in FTC history. The $275 million penalty is the largest ever for violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA (the previous FTC record of $136 million was held by Google over YouTube videos aimed at children).

Epic indeed. Almost enough to make you think gaming platforms have a customer-focused interest in enforcing privacy rules and controlling in-game payments.

‘Lionel Messi Rewrote Soccer History in the Best-Ever World Cup Final’ ★

Brian Phillips, writing for The Ringer:

OK, I’m going to do my best here. But I need you to know exactly what you are getting, as Joan Didion once wrote, and what you are getting is a man who cannot feel his face. My hands are still shaking. There are tears in my eyes. I’m writing this less than 10 minutes after the end of the greatest World Cup final ever, which Lionel Messi’s Argentina won on penalties over Kylian Mbappé’s France, and I do not believe it is recency bias that makes me think that this match was the single most thrilling sporting event I have ever witnessed. Every game is a story. And when you consider the stakes, the performances, the history in the balance, the refusal of either side to lose, the moments of astonishing play, the sudden reversals and wild swings of momentum, the knife’s-edge uncertainty of the outcome, and the epochal significance of a result that brought the career of the world’s best player to an almost magically perfect climax, it is hard to imagine a story more overwhelming or more satisfying than this one.

There’s something so pure — I want to say so innocent — about a story like this. It’s a story that feels lifted from a children’s book, a story unblemished by the disappointments and compromises and hypocrisies inescapable in adult life. This is, in a way, the essence of sport’s appeal to us. It lets us escape, for a few hours at a time, into a better world.

I am not a soccer fan, really, but in 2014 I started getting into the World Cup. Yesterday’s World Cup final was just remarkable: fun, dramatic, exciting, brilliant. Phillips’s take captures it all.