The FTC has ordered Microsoft to pay a $20 million fine after finding that it had illegally gathered personal information on minors throughXboxwithout informing their parents.
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As reported byGamesIndustry.biz, Xbox also breached the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by holding onto the data for “longer than is reasonably necessary to fulfil the purpose for which it was collected”. Microsoft claims that this is due to a “technical glitch” (in that the systems in place to delete said data were not working). Microsoft has since addressed the FTC’s complaints and deleted the data manually. It also reassures that the data gathered was “never used, shared, or monetised”.
You need an Xbox account to play games and access online features, which means providing an email address, phone number, date of birth, and full name. As such, Microsoft was gathering these details from minors without always having their parent’s consent, and then holding onto it for longer than necessary. This is forbidden under COPPA.
Not only will Microsoft have to pay a $20 million fine as a result of this breach, but the FTC told it to retroactively get parental consent for any accounts created before May 2021 if the account holder is still under the age of 13. Microsoft has said it will do this, while it has also claimed it’s building a “next-generation identity and age validation system which will be a “convenient, secure, one-time process”.
Elsewhere, Blizzard - which Microsoft is currently in the process of trying to acquire alongside Activision and King - wasfined €5,000 for failing to disclose the presence of loot boxes in Diablo Immortal. Both it and Hunt: Showdown “were published in 2022 and although they contain paid random items (like loot boxes or card packs), this was not disclosed to PEGI when the games were submitted for a rating license. Since this amounts to a violation of the rules described in the PEGI Code of Conduct, the PEGI Enforcement Committee sanctioned both companies with a fine of €5,000.”
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