Harpooned by Facebook

As smart devices become a bigger part of our lives, tech companies are learning more about us – not only what TV shows we like or what products we buy, but also where we might be financially vulnerable. On this week’s episode ([link removed]) , we look at how Facebook and other companies are profiting from this knowledge.

We start with a game called Ninja Saga. It’s free to play on Facebook, but if you want to do something extra, such as make your ninja more powerful, you have to pay money. One night in 2011, Glynnis Bohannon’s 12-year-old son, Ian, approached her with chore money so he could make a small purchase in the game. Bohannon put in her credit card info, thinking it would be a one-time payment. Later that night, Bohannon found a series of charges totaling almost $1,000. Ian told his mother that he hadn’t racked up the charges on purpose and demonstrated the gameplay that resulted in the transactions. As Bohannon watched him play, she realized the game’s design made it easy for Ian to make inadvertent purchases.

“Nothing popped up and said, ‘Do you want to proceed with this transaction of $19.95?’ ” Bohannon said. “Nothing came up at all.”

Bohannon started a class-action lawsuit against Facebook after she found these accidental charges had happened to other people as well. Facebook agreed to create an easier way for kids and parents to ask for refunds, but it didn’t make game developers change their designs. We unsealed the records from that case and found that Facebook identified this problem back in 2011 – and did nothing to fix it.

We’ve created a resource guide for gamers or parents who’ve received unwanted charges from games on Facebook. Check it out here ([link removed]) .

Our episode this week also shows how online social casino companies and Facebook are using data to target people with gambling addiction. In Texas, Suzie Kelly downloaded a “free” app called Big Fish Casino – and ended up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Social casinos have an addiction rate that’s five times higher than regular casinos, and companies are using behavior analysis to target those vulnerable to addiction. Facebook can analyze its database of personal information to identify those individuals, then charge the casinos a premium to target them in ad campaigns.

“I was nothing but a pawn, just money,” Kelly said.

Finally, at Avast – a company in Austin, Texas, that makes antivirus software – employees decided to look into whether new smart TVs were protecting users’ privacy. They found that one TV maker was using its devices to secretly gather marketing data on its customers and sell it to advertisers – and most users had no idea.

“As a consumer, you want to trust the companies that are creating the products that you use to not violate your privacy or trust them to be secure,” said Ross Dickey, a security researcher at Avast. “But really, what the reality is is that you can't trust them.”

N.C. shut down a group home last year. The US just gave it a contract to house migrant children

A Reveal and WRAL investigation found that the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement is planning to send immigrant children to a facility recently shut down by the state of North Carolina.

In July 2018, New Horizon Group Home had its license revoked by the state. Officials cited the company for a series of violations and stated at the time that conditions in the group home “present an imminent danger to the health, safety and welfare of the clients and that emergency action is required.”

In April, New Horizon was awarded a $4 million grant to house migrant children by the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Before being shut down, New Horizon operated a nine-bed facility. Under the new federal grant, it has agreed to provide beds for up to 72 migrant children.

Last month, Reveal’s Aura Bogado reported on how the federal government is expanding shelters for young children ([link removed]) , housing kids as young as 3 months old without their mothers and withholding legal services. An investigation we released last year found that the U.S. was sending migrant children to shelters with histories of abuse allegations ([link removed]) .

Read the story here. ([link removed])

Reveal nominated for 2 Emmys

Reveal has been named the recipient of two News & Documentary Emmy Award nominations ([link removed]) from The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

The Office of Missing Children ([link removed]) was nominated in the outstanding new approaches: current news category. We looked into what happened after thousands of children were taken away from their parents, and found, among other issues, that some children were held in office buildings owned by a company without a child care license.

The multimedia project includes an animated short documentary, a two-part audio documentary produced with PRX and The Texas Tribune, an interactive map produced in collaboration with The Associated Press, and a series of text pieces.

Kept Out ([link removed]) , our investigative reporting partnership with The Associated Press and PBS NewsHour, was nominated in the category of outstanding business, consumer or economic report. Following a yearlong analysis of 31 million mortgage records, Kept Out found that in 61 cities across America, people of color were more likely to be turned down for a loan even when they made the same amount of money and were seeking to buy a house in the same neighborhood as white applicants.

We also were part of a third nomination in the outstanding investigative report in a newsmagazine category for Case Cleared: How Rape Goes Unpunished in America ([link removed]) , a collaboration with Newsy and ProPublica. Case Cleared exposed how law enforcement agencies across the country used a classification known as exceptional clearance to make it appear as though they had solved rape cases when they simply had closed them.
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