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Comment by Gareth321 | Hacker News Reader

I'm fine with Epic getting financially reprimanded for dark patterns and anti-consumer behaviour. I am not on board with this:

> That lawsuit also accused the company of illegally enabling real-time voice and text chat communications for children and teens in the game by default.

So voice chat must now be turned off by default for all children across America? How on earth is this supposed to be policed? Should everyone playing a game be required to upload ID? And what is the gate between on and off by default? A single button press?

This one doesn't make any sense to me. Voice chat is a staple of online games. Having a core feature included in a game by default is common sense.

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I don’t know what the big deal is with people in this thread saying, “bah, this is impossible” but I work on a COPPA compliant game and “chat off for kids by default” is a standard or < 13 cannot play your game (my understanding, IANAL).

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/childrens-on...

How are you verifying age? The "this is impossible"s are about it being accurate on age not the disabling of chat once you have an accurate age. The point being the law is useless theatre that does nothing to prevent kids from using it but annoys everyone else anyways.

Here is a link to our support site which provides more information:

https://recroom.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4426900227735-...

Love Rec Room :)

But this is basically the button press the GP was talking about, during sign up (which can be separate from the main sign up on the same device) the kid just says they were born in 1912 and now the mic works. Yes it's compliant with the law but it's the same problem GP was actually talking about - there is no real verification.

Having parental controlled accounts is a nice feature in general though, regardless of the legal requirements. Ultimately things like this come down to making good parenting easier and that can help.

I think the idea is that parents are supposed to create accounts on Epic and Steam, not children. The parent selects the correct age during account creation.

What's stopping the kid from making a new account though? Knowing myself, I did similar things as a child especially since my parents were not very tech literate.

Exactly. It's a well-armoured safe door on a safe with no sides.

100% stopping kids in voice chat isn't the goal. Stopping kids from accidentality joining voice chat is.

So nothing is stopping them from purposefully getting a chat activated account, that's the point.

The law itself disagrees. It's quite explicit that the point is to not allow kids into chat rooms at all without parental consent. It does not mention anything about preventing kids from accidentally joining chat just that they are not the ones able to provide consent to allow chat.

Is your argument that the law specifically has language interpreting its goal?

Can you quote it please, because I find that surprising.

Voice chat without parental approval is less likely to happen if the device is in public space in the residence.

This is true independent of the law.

I've made fake accounts for my kids where I lied about their age, in order to bypass certain restrictions. That's how screwed up our legislation is in this area.

So just set it to off by default for everyone? That seems like a pretty pragmatic and very non-theatrical improvement. Of course it will have to contend with the theatrics of gamers whining about the immense hassle of a one-time settings change to enable voice chat.

How does this prevent children from enabling voice chat?

The FTC's statement specifically says the issue is that it was on by default. Not that it could possibly be turned on by a child.

> The FTC’s $275 million proposed settlement with Epic Games, owner of Fortnite, alleges the company violated the law by collecting personal information from kids under 13 without parental consent and by enabling voice and text chat by default

The law is that <13 can not be voice recorded without parental consent, the way Fortnite broke this was by having it on by default. This does not mean the only way to break this is by having it on by default it's just what Fortnite was doing.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2017/10/...

Even if "by default" was the law though that would seem to make things even more theatrical and less pragmatic anyways.

Right but could it possibly be the case that FTC knows there's no reasonable way to validate ages, and they'd not go after companies for "affirm you're not <13 years of age" so long as they make a reasonable effort to prevent it, or at least not set the default to be in clear violation of the law?

You know, alcohol, weed, and porn companies have managed just fine with user affirmations.

“I am 18+” is a well known joke as well and you can’t get purchased alcohol/weed without ID before it shows up (well, legally) because that’s when people realized they need a real measure not a fake one for show.

That the FTC would know there is no reasonable way would be a strong indicator it is indeed not a reasonable law. The default is definitely why Fortnite got fined, and is a reasonable reason to be fined, but it doesn’t make the law somehow effective it just makes Fortnite wrong for intentionally violating the law. I.e. they should have be fined but not because the law protects children effectively rather it’s not up to them to decide if it does on their own.

I don't even know what point you're trying to make now.

Changing the default will certainly reduce the number of kids who are subject to toxic game chat. FTC knows it, I know it, you know it, and Epic knows it.

I hate this word but it's about consent. If an 8 year old enables voice chat they're consenting to the shit that comes out of it. They may not fully understand what they're getting into, but that's a different issue.

perfect is the enemy of good here, the other poster is arguing that because it's not perfect and is easily circumvented that it will have no effect, and, as you said, we all know this isn't true.

"Off by default" is also a great way to make sure your feature is not used by the vast majority of people. It could easily lead to user attrition for new players looking for a social experience as well.

Maybe getting social experiences from places other than fortnite is a good thing?

Ah yes, the ol' "lower user engagement versus non-stop racial slurs piped into the ears of the 13 year olds you just marketed your highly addictive game to" dilemma

For what it's worth, games like Dota 2 already default all communication on new accounts to "off". It's a rite of passage for new players to play some games and realize they haven't heard anyone say anything. Then they find the setting and realize they're being relentlessly flamed for being new.

Once you climb out of the beginner ranks, literally everyone has found the communication settings and has adjusted them to their preferences.

I agree that most of the time, people don't change defaults. But isn't true for team games in my experience.

Ah yes, the classic "privacy/security/compliance hurts our funnel" argument. Said as if the former aren't more important than the latter.

I think a difficulty here is that a lot of responders are imagining that all children are the same precocious 13 year old they were -forgetting the trusting 8 to 10 year olds they also were, and they are doing that thing where the edge cases start to dwarf the primary purpose in their minds.

Yeah apparently on the one hand, setting the default to Off would absolutely clobber Fortnite's engagement metrics and the law is unjust for this. On the other hand, setting the default to Off would not make a dent in children's usage of this product and therefore the law is useless.

Who cares about their engagement metrics? Like, what societal good does it do? I’m not sure the law is unjust because a company’s (non financial) metrics are impacted when the law acts as intended.

For the record, I’m pro games and against pearl clutching game ratings and “for the children” style laws, but I’m also not very sympathetic to big companies profits being a motivation for our lawmakers.

There are multiple ways, but considering they own a company that is supposed to do this as a service, failing to do this for the own biggest game seems a bit weak.

https://www.superawesome.com/

Amazing the contradictory thinking people have about “it’s impossible to know a child’s age” vs. “it’s totally fine and reasonable that Google knows you’re pregnant before you do”.

SuperAwesome KWS is another click button "verification" solution. Being interested in selling ads in a COPPA compliant-enough way isn't the same thing as making COPPA verification accurate/more than theatre.

Fortnite was too blatant with it by doing this with all accounts including ones that had entered young ages but that doesn't mean other apps that follow the entered age are accurate it just means they aren't likely to get fined. Which sure - still fine Fortnite. Knowingly breaking a law because you want to doesn't make you exempt from the law even if the law is useless in practice.

I'd personally like if the law could be made into something more meaningfully verifiable I just don't think there is a reasonable way to do so. E.g. the UK has an opt-in requirement at the ISP level for porn access because "I am 18+" buttons weren't actually doing anything but making a legal bypass. Yet it's both a ridiculously bad solution and still easily worked around anyways.

I'm not a lawyer, but does the law require 100% un-hackable accuracy? Not the law as-written, but as-enforced? Has anyone been successfully penalized because they failed to catch one under-13 year old who said "Yes" to a dialog? Most sites I've seen either ask for your birth year or your age, and trust what the user says. If that's enough to be in compliance, why would any company make it more complicated? It's like if you've ever visited an alcohol company's web site, they ask "Are you 21?" and if you say yes, that's all they care about.

Amazing how many people in this thread want to run to the government to solve the problem.

It’s kind of like that musk thread from yesterday where a bunch of people showed up to defend the policy of banning links. If someone makes a rule, there will always be someone else who thinks it’s a good idea.

As someone who grew up on roleplaying games when I was about 13, and had lots of exposure to the adult side of life, I’m with you. It’s totally lame that the government is trying to regulate this.

13 is nothing like 10, or 8. I have nephews playing on their own at 4.

I do not have children but I could not imagine my parents leaving me with unfettered access to a TV at age 4. If the Internet had been around, they certainly wouldn't have given me an internet-enabled device and left me by myself.

How is playing games online where you can communicate with random people across the world without any sort of parental supervision possibly a good idea?? And why is it someone else's problem?

I don't mean this rudely, but how about actually doing some parenting?

I used to work with a guy who said the schools should be doing more to make children behave better, as if he was somehow absolved of any input. Absolutely baffling.

I'm also not a parent or a teacher. And I try my best to not give parenting advice to actual parents.

It helps to remember that life is complicated and there are limitless factors that can contribute to a family dynamic. Growing up my parents barely knew what the internet was and just associated it with "the computer". They attuned it as a "toy" and nothing serious. This allowed me unfiltered access to anything that was on the internet at the time.

You'd hope today's parents are more knowledgeable but I bet the majority of parents are just trying to get by and aren't ramped up as to how everything works today. They may be pressured to go with the technological flow head first due to society without fully knowing or controlling everything.

Anyways, back to my point, telling someone to "go parent right", especially as a non-parent, maybe you can approach it better.

I sympathize with parents, but I can only accept the naiveté argument up to a point. It's one thing to be naive. It's another to make your naiveté a problem for everyone else. At this point, it is simply not reasonable for a parent to be completely oblivious to the dangers of the internet for little kids.

Yes that's a good point that people aren't necessarily clued up on the intricacies of the technology they're liberally giving to their children, but that still doesn't negate actual supervision. It's like handing a handsaw to your child and then wandering off.

And my main point that supervision and parenting go hand in hand doesn't require me to be a parent to know that, in the same way that I know that a handsaw can be dangerous yet I am not a carpenter. You don't need to be Parent of the Year or a genius to know that leaving children unsupervised with something can go very badly, like leaving them to play with plug sockets... My parents didn't need to get to their second child to learn that - it's obvious.

I'm not sure how else I could possibly word it to make such an obvious point more palatable, even though I am no expert in parenting. (I do have cats though and I know not to leave ANYTHING out because they wreck it.... That also doesn't take much to work out even if you don't own cats!)

At some point we have to consider it the parent's/guardian's responsibility to restrict a child's access to any service that provides access to online, user-generated content without supervision.

Despite all my problems with Epic, I agree with OP here. This should not be Epic's problem. This is a problem for parents/guardians and the ESRB/PEGI. The ESRB and PEGI rated the game for 13+ and 12+ respectively, which I'd argue is appropriate, so IMO it should be entirely a problem for the parents/guardians.

Translating what FTC is saying to plain English, FTC is saying Epic didn't do enough to move liability away from them (Epic) and onto the parents/guardian. The liability ball was still in Epic's court, so FTC fined them.

If Epic had some form of age verification in place, past that point it's the parents'/guardian's problem whether the kid lies or the kid asks them to give their authorization. The liability ball would be in the parents'/guardian's court.

It's why all software and websites that handle data coming from underage kids always verify age or straight up don't handle that data (eg: Youtube Kids videos' comments, the lack thereof) at all.

Obligatory IANAL.

I’d recommend reading the complaint. To my surprise, regardless of the ratings, Epic was explicitly marketing to 10+. Like there are written statements to that effect.

> Epic was explicitly marketing to 10+

Translated to english this means they were marketing to 6-14 year olds.

Epic could add a dose of CYA here. Disable voice and text chat, and put the enable switch behind a "for 18+ only" or something like that and have them confirm their birthdate. Not that it would actually stop minors from bypassing this by clicking through the prompt and entering a fake age. But this would allow Epic to argue to the court that they are doing more than their competitors to verify that children are not using voice/text chat and that requiring them to go further would be unfair.

* Not a lawyer

When we get into situations like this, you do have to question if the law requiring it is just plain silly.

Thinking about it, I can't blame the FTC for requiring it even if it is laughably stupid. If their mandate is "Do the best you can", putting in some obstruction to kids voice chat is better than nothing. Even if it only prevents 0.00001 more kids from using voice chat, their mandate is to choose that over 0.

If this is a COPPA issue, you just have to ask for birth year and you’re allowed to trust the answer.

Yeah, I don’t know what the big deal is with people in this thread saying, “bah, this is impossible” but I work on a COPPA compliant game and “chat off for kids by default” is absolutely a must.

It’s because a lot of engineers get hung up in the “oh there’s so many ways to defeat this” mindset, and forget that perfect is the enemy of good.

Sensible defaults are a good enough start and many regulations like this are based around best efforts , not absolute perfection.

Yup. It’s both true that the age gate is easy to defeat and that it helps in practice.

It seems so pointless though.

I was signing up for all sorts of things when I was a kid. Nothing bad by any stretch of the imagination but I knew when they asked "are you 13" you just click "yes" and you're good to go.

Seems like a "feel good" solution that will collectively waste thousands of hours. I don't see why this is required, quite honestly.

It is somewhat performative but it does save some percentage of children who are honest about it, and at the very least it lets you pass the buck to the user.

Yeah it’s easily defeated but so is wearing seatbelts when you drive.

There's also the fact that the kid who is enough of a dope(/trusting/rule and authority abiding) to not know he can lie on the form is also the most likely to be victimized by adults online.

This is a similar selection effect to misspelled Nigerian prince emails, so I'd say it's a pretty good mechanism actually.

If I have a F2P game on mobile, do I then have to force ask the users age at the start to track things like DAU without getting potentially sued because I was unintentionally without knowing tracking < 13 years?

IANAL. However, my answer to that question would be “it’s a good idea.”

COPPA specifically calls out collecting device identifiers and cookies as personal information. Here’s the money line:

“It shall be unlawful for any operator of a Web site or online service directed to children, or any operator that has actual knowledge that it is collecting or maintaining personal information from a child, to collect personal information from a child in a manner that violates the regulations prescribed under this part.”

Note “directed to children.” If your game isn’t directed to children, you’re fine, but that’s a terribly fuzzy definition. In practice I would recommend taking the safe road and age gating for games. Again, I am not a lawyer.

Edit: I read the complaint and Epic was explicitly marketing to ages 10+, so this wasn’t at all fuzzy for them.

Thank you, that makes sense.

So just because perfect enforcement is not possible the law doesn’t make sense to you? Of the billions(maybe trillions) of interactions on this game this law prevents millions of stupid ones with small children. That’s more than enough of a reason for you to click one extra button. Boo boo. Google seat belt law statistics on a similar situation.

I'm not super familiar with the details of the case, but I'm familiar with Fortnite since I play it with my son. We frequently find voice chat being turned back on at startup, despite us turning it off. Maybe that's what they are referring to, somewhat sloppily?

> So voice chat must now be turned off by default for all children across America? How on earth is this supposed to be policed? Should everyone playing a game be required to upload ID? And what is the gate between on and off by default? A single button press?

I mean, if it's just turned off by default under the plain meaning of words... just turn it off for everyone by default, and if you want to listen to children calling you racial slurs, you can turn it on. No need to collect ages.

Otherwise, I've never seen much more than asking for your birth year to determine age, so it only affects children who can't figure out how to lie about their age. A skill that I've seen develop in minutes within the right framework.

Turn off voice chat by default for everyone. Let people opt-in to the toxicity that is online gaming.

I played a lot of Destiny, and it doesn't (didn't?) have voice chat. No problem. I also played a lot of Overwatch, which has voice chat that I didn't use. No problem. When I wanted to queue up for ranked, I would join a group and we would turn on voice chat. Also no problem.

I'm not sure why your position is "children should have to opt out of voice chat". Why not "adults have to opt in to voice chat"? After all, it's single button press?

I didn't play Destiny, but Destiny 2 definitely has voice chat enabled by default.

You ask the users for their date of birth on signup, don't tell them that it will be used for age-gating features (to avoid incentivizing lying), and don't allow the date to be changed without some kind of age verification.

Or you use the social graph to infer age: somebody who mainly plays with 10 year olds is probably also about 10. If they claim to be 20, require an id anyway.

Non-gaming companies deal with this all the time. It's annoying, but shouldn't require blazing any new trails.

10 year olds aren't as dumb as you're assuming here, they'd either make a new account, or have already been been putting an 18+ birth date for years.

All anyone cares about is covering their own ass, so it'd solve that issue, but it would have neglibile effect on anything real.

Source: Used the internet when I had to lie to every site about being over 13, so lied to every site about being over 13. Also vrchat requires being 13+, and boy, does 'requiring' it not accomplish anything at all.

We all know this can be bypassed but it is still the strategy pursued by a lot of services where some or all content is not appropriate for kids.

Yeah, Google thinks I'm 31 years older than I actually am.

It doesn't matter whether some will circumvent the age-gate. The company made an attempt, and enough kids are blocked by it, this is a good enough for the law, at the moment. But Epic is not willing to even walk this short way...

What is the point then? It would be like a bar tender asking if you're 21 and letting you drink if you just reply "yes." Regulators would be happy though because "at least you tried?"

I get its just trying to shift the burden onto the parents and the "lying child" but at the end of the day it just seems like it would collectively waste so many hours.

The point is that it's better than no having no solution. Not every kid is lying, not every kid is on its own. That we need a better solution, does not invalidate usage of the existing in the meantime.

>The point is that it's better than no having no solution

IMO, I just feel like it wastes too much time to justify itself. Hundreds of thousands of hours spent on a solution that relies entirely on the (unreliable) respondent.

You're saying this like it's bad but I'm not sure it is. If kids want to use voice chat they can, all they have to do is lie about their age. Default off for children is a good policy, and allowing them to get it around it with some effort probably is too. Seems like what's important here is that unsuspecting children aren't thrown into voice chat and immediately called the n word or something. If the kids are prepared to be bullied then they can go ahead with voice chat.

So are we all forced to have a signup at the start to not get sued? Can't just have a mobile/browser game that tracks basic data?

It is federal law that taking any data from children under 13 requires prior authorization from the parents/guardian. If your code takes any data, you must verify the end user's age and, if they are underage, provide a way for the parents/guardian to contact you for giving authorization.

Yes, we all know kids lie when they see the age verification, but the presence of age verification moves the liability away from the developer/publisher and onto the parents/guardian of the underage kid.

Obligatory IANAL.

> So voice chat must now be turned off by default for all children across America? Should everyone playing a game be required to upload ID? And what is the gate between on and off by default? A single button press?

When you go to the shop to buy alcohol you need to show an id. So, adults are free to buy alcohol but not children. Why is this any different?

I understand that the problem comes from the amount of chat abuse in on-line communities. It not just swearing but the constant harrasement as soon as someone is losing a match, or even if they are winning.

I understand your concerns, but ignoring the chat problem paints a partial picture of the situation.

what was "the chat problem" ?

The fact that online gaming chat is really really toxic. It's one of those things where christian mothers were right about video games but wrong about why. It turns out that artificial violence and guns and sex aren't some big corrupting influence but hanging around assholes for the majority of your leisure time and social activity absolutely is.

Online gaming where the only communication between players is jumping and canned voice lines is a wildly different experience.

Or maybe this is exactly the same as those christian mothers, in the sense that it's "think of the children" hysteria from modern day puritans?

Oh no, it's "this shit is bad for absolutely everyone regardless of age and in some cases worse for adults, particularly young men, but it's politically infeasible to do anything to stop it once people turn 18."

The irony is that the people I find to be most toxic in video games are the children. To the point that in a lot of "Looking for Group" Discord channels you see people saying "18+ only".

It's almost like people without fully developed brains don't have very healthy social interactions in a giant soup of similar kids who don't know how to have healthy social interactions and the 4chan-ness of it just encourages being as angry and toxic as possible.

It's actually probably the same problem drivers face. When driving, your brain kind of ignores that other normal humans drive the other cars, and therefore you are extremely judgemental of their actions, because you expect them to be perfect. This is why so many people road rage.

I don't share your experience at all. In fact the the majority of online gaming chats I've been in have been relatively enjoyable and low drama.

It's generally the ones that have children in them that get toxic - I would guess because children have less developed social filters and act out their negative emotions more readily than adults.

> It's generally the ones that have children in them that get toxic

That is the problem. Kids are learning from each other to be harmful and hateful as there is no consequences for that behaviour. In other spaces they will be called out by adults, but game chats become a learning place for the worst behaviours at the same time that this games are rated as "apt for children". Rate them 18+ or kill the chat, it is all about not lying to buyers.

Somehow that wasn't an issue the last two decades, comparing it to alcohol is absurd, you dont go to the epic cornerstore and talk to the epic fortnite clerk to unlock voice chat.

This war on "toxicity" at the expense of basic communication is insane, the match ends and it all supposed harassment ends.

Children in voice chat has been an issue for decades, maybe you just didn't notice?

It’s not uncommon for the OS to have an age lock these days (eg iOS) that parents can set, and kids can’t unset. Or, the parent can set the age in the console’s user profile and the system locks it.

That seems to be a trivial solution to the problem here.

In this case there is a small amount of work required of Epic to enable the law to be enforced in the ecosystem. Without that work to add profiles and enforce ages in the game, the OS/platform cannot enforce either. So it’s obviously moving things towards compliance to ding Epic here.

Voice chat has been a “staple” but it’s consistently a torrent of abuse in the most mainstream games for almost two decades now. God help you if your voice presents female.

The game industry loves the mainstream ignorance on this issue. Epic conveniently omits the fact from parents giving their kids Fortnite bux that their 11 year old kid is directly talking with adults twice their age.

Seems like there are lots of ways to confirm age, with various levels of sophistication and thoroughness. I think it’d be easy to improve on the status quo of a flat zero.

Huh? That's the easiest one of all - anything that is privacy invading should be off by default. Most of us are not super aware of what the hell is 'on and off' in this nutty world.

It's exceedingly nuts to me that I would start doing something and all of a sudden random strangers could hear me or interact with me.

Default off for everyone, probably by law.

Anyone can just turn the default to be 'on' it's not a big deal.

Can it be off by default but the user can enable it manually? Does it say it's off unless age verified or just off by default?

> How on earth is this supposed to be policed? Should everyone playing a game be required to upload ID?

No need for a photo ID, Epic is also under fire for the amount of data it already collects from children. They are well aware who is playing. [1]

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/12/record-se...

> Voice chat is a staple of online games. Having a core feature included in a game by default is common sense.

It is so common sense that many games have minute long sections where it is outright impossible to mute trolls because the controls for voice chat aren't always accessible. Quite sure Fallout 76 didn't have any controls for it at all when it came out. The only choice in that case is to mute sound permanently, which is fucking stupid.

> Having a core feature included in a game by default is common sense.

I rarely use voice chat and the build in one even less. Call me old fashioned but I often just use a team speak server when playing with friends - once it works, it works for all games.

What's wrong with keeping voice chat off by default? That is a sensible approach for everyone, not just kids.

Exactly. It's extremely intrusive to have some random fool listening in on my own household, when I may be unaware. People have no idea how technology works, even smart people.

Default mic/camera etc. off - they can provided a nice little popup and have us turn it on.

Because companies will always push boundaries and cross the line, we need legislation unfortunately and can only hope the legislators don't fuck it up.

This I can get behind... but I do always go to the options and turn on "push to talk."

I don't like the idea of legislation requiring such a thing though.

We need legislation because PM's pushed to profit by CEO's just cross the line far too often. It's hard to explain but when you see it, you understand. It's the game we create. We don't even need to point the finger, because usually it's not 'someone's fault' is just stuff that happens. Many of these decisions are made even without deliberation.

It'd be nice to have 'best practices' oversight instead of lawyers but we're not that sophisticated yet.

And we don't really have a way of contemplating 'scale' aka once companies reach a certain size, their impact is greater and we have to be more careful.

It’s mostly down to who the game targets. If it’s clear that under 13 kids will be playing, then COPA rules apply.

So if you are making a Lego game, you’ll need to comply, but if you are making “Murder Sex Drugs III” then you won’t.

> Murder Sex Drugs III

I'd preorder that game in a heartbeat.

This is also an accessibility barrier for the blind. (To be fair, ADA regulations now require games to include text-to-speech and speech-to-text support for in-game chat to mitigate it.)

Can they please turn it off by default for everyone?

I shouldn’t have to go to the settings for every single game to find out if some random fucker is going to hear me crunching on chips.

So, you are against any laws relating to the internet and children?

Seems easy to comply by just applying it to everyone.

voice chat will simply move to 3rd party apps, Suchas discord.

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