Microsoft accused of violating children's privacy on the internet

The US Federal Trade Commission has ordered Microsoft to pay $20 million to settle allegations and improve privacy protections for children using its Xbox video game service.

On June 5, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said that software development corporation Microsoft will have to pay 20 million USD to settle allegations of illegally collecting personal information of children.

According to the FTC, Microsoft is accused of violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by illegally collecting personal information from children who signed up for Xbox video game accounts.

The FTC has asked Microsoft to improve privacy protections for children using its Xbox video game service, and said it will expand COPPA's coverage to third-party video game publishers with whom Microsoft shares data.

The FTC's new decision will help parents protect their children's privacy on Xbox and limit what information Microsoft can collect, said Samuel Levine, head of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection.

Information such as avatars, biometric data and children's health information are not exempt under COPPA, the official said.

US law requires websites and online services aimed at children under 13 to obtain parental consent to collect and use personal information from children and to notify parents of the information collected.

Between 2015 and 2020, Microsoft is said to have stored personal data collected from child users during account creation, even if the parent did not successfully complete the account creation process.

In May, technology company Twitter accused Microsoft of violating social network rules that apply to developers related to the platform's data access issues.

In a letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the lawyer representing billionaire Elon Musk - CEO of Twitter, Mr. Alex Spiro, emphasized that Microsoft had violated many terms of the Agreement over a long period of time.

The letter said Microsoft had stopped accessing Twitter's data sources in April 2023 and had chosen not to pay API (application programming interface) access fees under the new regulations.

The US social networking platform asked Microsoft to review all Twitter content it has collected over the past two years and respond by June 7 on how this content is stored and used.

Twitter executives are looking into whether Microsoft exceeded the "reasonable volume" of requests in its free API access rules, leading to behavior that constitutes "abusive use of data"./.

Luyen Vien (Vietnam+)

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