Microsoft Corp. agreed to pay $20 million to settle a US Federal Trade Commission claim that the company illegally collected data from children who signed up to use its Xbox gaming system. The Redmond, Washington tech giant required anyone using the Xbox Live service to register with a name, email address and age information. But even when the company was aware of users under age 13 it continued to collect and retain data in violation of a US kids\u2019 online privacy law, according to the FTC. Microsoft blamed a \u201cdata retention glitch\u201d and promised to improve its systems.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn addition to our existing multifacted safety strategy, we also plan to develop next-generation identity and age validation \u2014 a convenient, secure, one-time process for all players,\u201d the company said in an emailed statement. With the settlement, Microsoft joins the ranks of dozens of other companies including Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc.\u2019s Google and ByteDance Ltd\u2019s TikTok who have faced FTC penalties for collecting data on children without parental consent. <\/p>\n
As part of the settlement, Microsoft agreed to delete within two weeks any information collected about kids without parental consent and to notify any video game publishers that seek personal information if users are children. Microsoft\u2019s Minecraft \u2014 a game franchise popular with children where users create 3D worlds with Lego-like blocks \u2014 has 141 million active players worldwide, according to Statista.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Microsoft Corp. agreed to pay $20 million to settle a US Federal Trade Commission claim that the company illegally collected data from children who signed up to use its Xbox gaming system. The Redmond, Washington tech giant required anyone using the Xbox Live service to register with a name, email address and age information. But even when the company was aware of users under age 13 it continued to collect and retain data in violation of a US kids\u2019 online privacy law, according to the FTC. Microsoft blamed a \u201cdata retention glitch\u201d and promised to improve its systems. \u201cIn addition […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-800199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it-2"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=800199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800199\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=800199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=800199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=800199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}