This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on December 20th, 2022. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.
The makers of Fortnite are facing billion-dollar fines for deceiving children. But the true scale of the problem is far larger — and the white lies are many.
Did your children accidentally buy a llama or a battle pass in Fortnite? If so, you may be owed a refund from the American consumer watchdog, the FTC.
The Federal Trade Commission has come down hard, issuing the largest fine in its history: 5.4 billion kronor.
According to the FTC, Epic Games — the company behind Fortnite — unlawfully collected data on children under 13 and operated a digital storefront designed in ways that led to unintended purchases.
Epic Games said it agreed to the settlement because it wants to be a “leader in consumer protection.”
The billion-kronor fine sounds impressive. But the money is almost certainly a drop in the ocean compared to what it would cost if all the games and internet services that exploit children actually had to pay for it.
The situation for children and young people online is, frankly, not good. And every party bears a share of the blame.
The laws are often old and hard to comply with. Companies behave as though children simply do not exist on the internet. And parents have no real idea what their children are actually doing.
Why isn’t this being fixed?
The first reason is that almost nothing online is designed with children in mind. Services like YouTube, Google and Instagram all have adults as their primary audience. But there are no watertight identity checks. A twelve-year-old can simply claim to be thirteen — and that one year is the line between being a child and an adult in the strict legal sense.
These questions are governed in the US by a law called COPPA — the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. In Europe, the equivalent is GDPR-K, part of the broader data protection package that came into force in 2018.
COPPA has age working against it. It was written long before the first iPhone existed, and therefore long before Snapchat, TikTok or Fortnite. The law has been updated over the years, but companies still need to hire expensive consultants just to be confident they are getting it right.
The third challenge is one shared by games and internet services alike: the human factor.
If there is one universal truth about parents and children, it is that adults overestimate their children’s abilities, and children want to do what their older siblings do. Anyone who works on children’s products — digital or physical — will confirm this.
In the digital world, it means that younger siblings get access to TikTok or Fortnite earlier than older ones did, simply because it becomes harder and harder to justify saying no. Parents can also be spectacularly unaware of what their children are doing online — even when it costs money.
Well-resourced groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have pushed back against new legislation, arguing that the risk of excessive content censorship is too great.
What is clear is that even with new laws, bringing order to this space will be difficult.
And so Epic Games will now pay 5.4 billion kronor.
“No game developer creates a game with the intention of ending up here,” the company wrote in a statement about the settlement. That is an optimistic view of the gaming industry.
The problem is rather the opposite: very few game developers create games with the intention of not ending up here.
Ignoring the fact that children and young people are online solves nothing. And as Epic Games has now discovered, it can also turn out to be very expensive.
