Irish Examiner view: Tech firms not above the law

Creators of Fortnite fined over child privacy rules

Inside the Arthur Ashe tennis stadium in New York for the first-ever Fortnite World Cup last year.

We have now reached an ominous point in our relation with the tech sector megacompanies, from Google to Meta and on to Twitter and Tiktok.

No matter how egregious the offences they commit, whether those relate to unapproved location tracking or the harvesting of users’ private data, we seem to accept those offences as a hidden cost of connectedness. 

Agreeing to terms and conditions in order to use these platforms seems a pointless exercise when the platform providers are the ones abusing those terms and conditions.

The latest instalment in this ongoing litany of transgressions is the fine imposed on the creators of Fortnite, the online gaming system. 

Epic Games has agreed to pay out $520m (€489m) after it was alleged that the company had broken child privacy laws and had tricked players into making unintentional purchases.

The allegation of unintentional purchases is immediately concerning as Fortnite is particularly popular among children and teenagers. 

Parents blindsided by sudden costs and expenses are unlikely to have much sympathy for the company benefiting from those purchases.

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But there is also a more subtle danger here in the normalisation of privacy guidelines being broken. An entire generation of children and teens is growing up whose private details are being captured and disseminated for gain, and those who are capturing those details are clearly not deterred by the punishment incurred by those actions.

The sums paid out by tech giants in fines would give any normal business pause — they tend to run into the hundreds of millions — yet these companies appear to absorb those punishments without blinking. The obvious conclusion is that the fines are not achieving their purpose, which is to act as a serious disincentive to repeating those offences.

In that case it is difficult to see why regulating bodies continue to impose them; those regulatory bodies must find another way to dissuade companies from breaking the law with apparent impunity.