Tiny hands and big bills: How should mobile platform providers deal with under-13s?
If you’ve ever marvelled at a toddler effortlessly navigating a touchscreen device, it’ll come as no surprise that kids’ smartphone and tablet apps are big business. We may recall with nostalgia the days when children passed their time happily injuring their siblings with hardback books and digging holes in their families’ lawns, but with apps squarely targeted at kids dominating the iTunes education chart and an estimated 40,000 children’s games available in the app store, kids with iPods, smartphones and connected devices are a 21st century reality.
Apple has been forced to settle with out of pocket parents
While app developers are creating increasingly engaging, innovative and educational experiences, it’s the platform providers who are struggling to keep up. Just ask any of the millions of parents who’ve been caught out by children making purchases on their devices, using real money to buy apps, add-ons and virtual goods. Recently Apple agreed to settle with a group of disgruntled parents, offering a combination of iTunes vouchers and refunds to those who could prove their children used their devices to carry out financial transactions they had not approved.
It’s easy to wag fingers and preach that parents should be watching their children more closely and modifying their devices’ settings. But even with these very sensible precautions in place, parents are left with an unsolvable quandary. If your children are under 13, Apple won’t let you register an Apple ID on their behalf. This is presumably in order to avoid compliance with COPPA, which places restrictions on gathering data on under-13s without verifiable parental consent.
If you register your son or daughter’s iPod with the same Apple ID you use yourself, you won’t be able to separate your own purchases from your child’s (and you’ll also fall foul of Apple’s terms of service). Add to this that the time will eventually come when your kids are old enough to have their own accounts, and when that day arrives, they will lose access to all of their apps and downloads. Sure, the passage of time may have rendered this technology obsolete in a few years, but the first generation of 12-year-olds who played with their parents' iPhones are now old enough to go to university, and many of these early apps are still going strong.
With so many apps that are clearly aimed at children in the app store, it’s hard to accept that these devices are not expected to fall into little hands. In the wake of these payouts, it would surprise me if Apple isn’t working to address this in the coming months. Allowing users to group IDs into family accounts, with some ability to transfer downloads and create parent/child approvals, would be the obvious next step if these accounts are to successfully mature with their owners. Simply refusing to acknowledge that under-13s have access to these devices will never be sustainable in the long term.
Annie Macfarlane is head of community management at Yomego