The American FTC (“Federal Trade Commission”) has decided that Epic Games will have to pay DKK 5.1 billion in fines.
Record fines
The reason is that, according to the commission, the company must have tricked consumers into “involuntary purchases,” which they must have achieved with the help of deceptive design techniques, a method dubbed “dark schemes.”
The company is also charged, and must pay a fine (included in the bill’s total), for violating the privacy policy for children.
2 fines
Now the company has to activate stricter standard settings:
“Epic will need to adopt child and teen privacy default settings to ensure voice and text communications are turned off by default.”
There is therefore talk of $275 million for the privacy violation related to children and default settings, and then $245 million that the company must pay in compensation “for deceiving users into making changes unwanted”.
