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January 15, 2014 10:02 pm GMT

Apple Settles With FTC Over App Store In-App Purchases To Avoid Distracting Legal Fight

Image1 for post Apple Announces In-App Purchases For Free iPhone ApplicationsApple has settled with the FTC over concerns about its in-app purchase system in iOS applications, according to a letter from Tim Cook to employees obtained by 9to5Mac. The FTC announced earlier that it would later be issuing a full statement regarding a settlement with an unnamed tech giant, but the letter, also obtained by CNBC, spills the beans early on the nature of the agreement. In the letter, pasted in full below, Tim Cook explains that while Apple viewed the FTC complaint as a sort of “double jeopardy” for lawsuits from private citizens settled previously when Apple agreed to refund parents who’d banded together to get funds reimbursed for purchases made by their kids via the in-app mechanism, the company in the end decided that fighting the FTC would be “long” and “distracting.” He also says that the FTC requirements ask Apple to do nothing more than what it had planned to do all along. Team, I want to let you know that Apple has entered into a consent decree with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. We have been negotiating with the FTC for several months over disclosures about the in-app purchase feature of the App Store, because younger customers have sometimes been able to make purchases without their parents’ consent. I know this announcement will come as a surprise to many of you since Apple has led the industry by making the App Store a safe place for customers of all ages. From the very beginning, protecting children has been a top priority for the App Store team and everyone at Apple. The store is thoughtfully curated, and we hold app developers to Apple’s own high standards of security, privacy, usefulness and decency, among others. The parental controls in iOS are strong, intuitive and customizable, and we’ve continued to add ways for parents to protect their children. These controls go far beyond the features of other mobile device and OS makers, most of whom don’t even review the apps they sell to children. When we introduced in-app purchases in 2009, we proactively offered parents a way to disable the function with a single switch. When in-app purchases were enabled and a password was entered to download an app, the App Store allowed purchases for 15 minutes without requiring a password. The 15-minute window had been there since the launch of the App Store in 2008 and was aimed

Original Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/C-b6Hk1AQj4/

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