Microsoft cops $20M slap on the wrist for mishandling kids' Xbox data

Microsoft is being fined $20 million by the US Federal Trade Commission for violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by illegally gathering kids' personal information and retaining it without parental consent. Along with paying the rather small fine (slightly more than a tenth of a percent of Microsoft's …

[Anonymous Coward]

Creating an Xbox account requires ... first and last names, an email address, and a birth date.

AFAIR (but perhaps they've tightened up), it only requires you to provide _a_ first and last name, an email address, and a birth date; i.e. the only field needing accuracy is the email address. Not that this detail should get them off any hooks...

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Not Only But Also

"McCarthy said Microsoft has updated its account creation process as required by the FTC settlement, and now requires players to first provide a date of birth, and receive parental permission to proceed as necessary, before providing any additional PII"

Who is going to provide\verify the contact details & permission of the parents, the kiddies I mean its not like Microsoft already have every households IP & email addresses from all those Microsoft accounts that are required to login to Windows 10\11......

..........................................Ohhhh Hang on a moment!

[CowHorseFrog]

If orgs like the RIAA can seek legal damages of millions per song, why cant people do the reverse on companies like Microsoft or Facebook for "stealing" their personal data ?

Would be nice to see Facebook fined 1M for each count of personal information sold etc.

[Brian of Fairfield]

Indeed, until fines are 100 times this the likes of Microsoft will continue to treat this as 'a cost of doing business'.