NewsEpic Games agrees to pay record-breaking $520 million for privacy violations

IMAGE: ERIK MCLEAN/UNSPLASH

Epic Games, the developer of the popular video game Fortnite, agreed to pay $520 million over allegations the company violated digital privacy protections for children and used so-called “dark patterns” to trick users into making unintentional purchases, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced Monday.

“As early as 2017, Epic employees urged the company to change the default settings to require users to opt in for voice chat, citing concern about the impact on children in particular,” the FTC said in its announcement. “Despite this and reports that children had been harassed, including sexually, while playing the game, the company resisted turning off the default settings.”

“Epic ignored more than one million user complaints and repeated employee concerns that ‘huge’ numbers of users were being wrongfully charged,” the FTC said. “In fact, Epic’s changes only made the problem worse… Using internal testing, Epic purposefully obscured cancel and refund features to make them more difficult to find.”

https://therecord.media/epic-games-agrees-to-pay-record-breaking-520-million-for-privacy-violations/

Twitch source code and business data leaked on 4chan

Image: 4chan via Twitter

An unknown individual has leaked the source code and business data of video streaming platform Twitch via a torrent file posted on the 4chan discussion board earlier today.

The leaker said they shared the data as a response to the recent “hate raids” —coordinated bot attacks posting hateful and abusive content in Twitch chats— that have plagued the platform’s top streamers over the summer.

Catalin Cimpanu @campuscodi

https://therecord.media/twitch-source-code-and-business-data-leaked-on-4chan/