News of the Cyber World

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‘Fortnite’ Maker Epic Games Fined $520 Million Over Claims It Violated Children’s Privacy, Collected Personal Data

Epic Games, developer of the popular online video game Fortnite, has agreed to pay $520 million in penalties and refunds to settle allegations surrounding alleged violations of children’s privacy and the use of design tricks to dupe millions of players into making unintentional purchases.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the fines, the largest the FTC has ever imposed for a rule that it enforces, in separate releases on Dec. 19.

According to U.S. federal regulators Epic Games, North Carolina-headquartered Epic Games, founded by video game programmer Tim Sweeney and Canadian entrepreneur Mark Rein, violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA Rule), and the Federal Trade Commission Act.

Specifically, authorities argued that the game developer collected personal data from children under the age of 13, including their names, email addresses, and other identifiers used to keep track of players’ progress, as well as their purchase history, settings, and friends lists, without first obtaining parents’ verifiable consent or informing them that they were doing so.

Prosecutors also claimed that parents who requested their children’s personal information be deleted were made to “jump through unreasonable hoops” in order to have the information taken down and that Epic Games sometimes did not follow through with the requests.

Prosecutors further allege that Epic Games’ default settings were unfair under Section 5 of the FTC Act, as they publicly broadcast child and teen Fortnite players’ display names, and put children and teens in contact with adult Fortnite players via its real-time voice and text chat function.

The developer’s default settings, used in matching children and teens with strangers to play Fortnite together, also harmed children, according to prosecutors, and led to children and teenagers being bullied, threatened, harassed, and exposed to “dangerous and psychologically traumatizing issues such as suicide” while on Fortnite.

Elon Musk Criticizes Media for Not Covering Border Crisis

Musk took to Twitter on Dec. 19 to remark on several posts related to the massive flow of people entering the United States without authorization, including on a Harvard poll showing Americans vastly underestimating the scale of illegal immigration.

The poll, a monthly collaboration between the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard (CAPS) and the Harris Poll and HarrisX, showed that the median U.S. voter appears ill informed about the crisis, underestimating the number of illegal border crossings by a factor of 10.

While 64 percent of respondents correctly told the Harvard CAPS / Harris pollsters that the number of illegal border crossings had risen under President Joe Biden’s administration, the median voter incorrectly estimated the figure at between 250,000–500,000 per year.

The actual figure is far higher, with over 2.75 million people having come into the United States illegally over a 12 month period ending Sept. 30, 2022. That’s over 1 million more than in the prior year.

The poll also showed that, when respondents were presented with the true numbers, 67 percent said they want the Biden administration to issue new, stricter policies to reduce the flow of illegal immigrants into the country.

The data was shared by the @EndWokeness account on Twitter, prompting Musk to reply, “Why is this never in the news?”

In another instance, Musk commented on a clip filmed by Texas state Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Republican, and shared on Twitter by Fox News reporter Bill Melguin, which showed a Border Patrol processing center severely overcrowded.

Lawsuit Claims TikTok Violates Pennsylvania Wiretapping and Surveillance Rules

TikTok records every keystroke, click, swipe, and text communication—including information written but not sent by the user—when users enter other websites through the app.

That level of surveillance not only goes beyond user expectations, but in some states, it is a violation of wiretapping laws, a class action lawsuit filed last week in Pennsylvania alleges.

The case claims TikTok violates the Pennsylvania Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Control Act, which bans the interception and recording of private communications without prior consent of all parties to the conversation.

For example, to record a phone conversation, both parties must agree to the recording.
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In November, Kowalski visited a makeup company link through the TikTok app and shared personal information on that website to purchase a product from that company. She never agreed to share that information with TikTok, court papers say.

“When a purchase is made via TikTok’s in-app browser, [TikTok] automatically intercepts all the details of the purchase entered by the user, including the name of the purchaser, their address, telephone number, credit card or bank information, usernames, passwords, dates of birth, and other personal information,” says the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

“After intercepting and capturing the website communications, [TikTok] uses those website communications to recreate the Pennsylvania citizen’s entire visit to the website. [TikTok] creates and saves video replay of the user’s behavior on the website for analysis. This is the electronic equivalent of ‘looking over the shoulder’ of each visitor to the websites for the entire duration of their website interaction.”

The information, taken without the user’s consent, is used to send more targeted advertising to the user, court papers allege.