6-Year-Old Twins Spend $1,600 Playing iPad Game

We joke about letting the iPad babysit the kids while we travel with the kids or try to get some things down around the house, but this story from Britain is its own scary cautionary tale. Dad Ashley Griffith told the Daily Telegraph his 6-year-old twins spent the weekend playing with his iPad–and almost $1,600 on in-app purchases. When Griffiths and his wife received an email from Apple showing four pages’ worth of purchases of virtual pets and clothes for said pet, Ashley, understandably, was upset.

He couldn’t understand how easily his kids were able to buy things when playing a game. All it took was for them to enter mommy and daddy’s App Store password. Thankfully, Apple refunded the Griffiths’ money and for their part, the parents have since changed their password. Still, this and similar incidents has pushed England’s Office of Fair Trading to consider guidelines for in-app purchases, like asking for credit card details in addition to passwords. We’re glad the family got this all figured out, but should the kids even have had the password in the first place? And whose responsibility should it be to keep kids from spending what they think is fake money on virtual pets? The developers? The tablet manufactures? The government? - See more at: http://mommynoire.com/45965/6-year-old-twins-spend-1600-playing-ipad-game/#sthash.PEwRvg1a.dpuf